Empire
by J. Finch
Summary: It was a far different humanity that met the Council in the war-torn skies of Shanxi, setting off a chain of events that plunged the galaxy into a decades long cold war between the two.  A story of Shepard, Saren, politics, power and the lines between.
1. Prologue

_This was a project I'd started nearly a year ago, with the intent of practicing my world building, scene transition and, for the most part, my work with the science fiction genre, to which up to this point was shoddy at best. Hence, I wrote the prologue and first chapter of Empire, something that I'd managed to put together in around three weeks, which, considering how slowly I normally write, was somewhat surprising. Of course, I then descended into a month of "What the hell was I thinking?" revisions, followed by a lot of work editing and cleaning up the fic, and then more revisions, until I posted something I was happy with. Alas, it still wasn't all that good. So I left it and worked on a few other projects, mostly original fiction and whatnot until I came back to it a few weeks ago with an annoying What If plot bunny._

_I'm sure a few of you have come to suffer from those, and like, you, I just could not get anything done so long as it was sitting in my head like some kind of plot driven writing cancer. So I came back to it, and made some more "What the hell were you thinking?" revisions, and came to realize that I have no realistic sense of scale when it came to ships. Honestly though, I was running off of Eve Online proportions, so I honestly couldn't be blamed for that one right up until I got curious and found out an aircraft carrier, the big ones, are only around 3-400 meters long. Hoy shit, I said, and promptly shat a brick. Anyway, long story short, I've finally reached the point where I'm happy with what I have, so I'm going to run with it and see how it goes._

_Be gentle, I know it's not perfect, but still I like to think I did a pretty good job nonetheless. Constructive criticism is welcome and requested, please, because it helps, and so, without further ado, I present to you Mass Effect: Empire._

Best viewed in 3/4.

~(^_^)~

Humanity has always looked skyward for its true destiny. Reaching for heights undreamed and unheard of, always seeking a greater goal, a greater purpose than that which was known before, we strode forth into the unknown as a unified entity, a race of beings driven towards the heavens by an unshakable and unending pull.

In the years following what was known as the Last Great War, mankind was tired and worn from constant squabbling and scrounging for resources upon our homeworld. Earth had long since become a polluted ruin, corrupted by greed and negligence, a landscape of rusting factories and irradiated craters, drained and burned down, rent asunder and pillaged; it could no longer sustain our billions.

Humanity found itself on the brink of total collapse. With the few available resources being squandered to feed the elite and with multitudes starving in the streets we would have fallen into oblivion had it not been for the hand of fate and the will of one man. Born a vagrant in the infinite slum that was Earth, he stood up and looked to the sky, to the heavens that had so long ago vanished into the darkened and polluted clouds above.

And he saw a glorious future.

With a hand of fire he struck down the elite, the fat scum who had built an empire on the backs of the many, and united the world under one glorious banner. Under his guidance, mankind fought its way beyond the grip of what we were, little more than animals in the mud of the Earth. He showed us the path to glory.

Forged of steel and fire, we became his people, his Empire, servants to him who saved us from ourselves and showed us a universe that stood at our fingertips. Under his unified banner, we reached unimagined heights. Technologies that had existed as weapons of war became the tools of our ascension. Machinations like nuclear fusion, nanotechnology, cybernetics and bionetics, artificial intelligence and robotics, all once utilized as tools of subjugation helped forge our path to the stars. Once unified, we rebuilt ourselves, rising from the ashes of our dying homeworld as gods amongst the stars.

In the last century, we started with little more than steam technology and primitive engines, and within a hundred years we had mastered flight, motion and physics. We had created weapons so powerful that they could destroy cities, machines able to think millions of times faster than a human and a global network that gave people instant and accurate information at the press of a button. Within the next hundred years, we surpassed even the rapid ascent of our predecessors. Aided by quantum computers and the most primitive of AIs we created the greatest achievement in the history of our people. We created life. A thinking, feeling, living machine as human as those whose hands built it. It was human spirit tempered by computer logic. Inconceivably intelligent, it was a system of billions of singular nodes all working towards one goal - the betterment of humanity.

It was humanity's soul. Legacy, as the system was known, was a massive undertaking that was the sole focus of humanity for a great many years. It was a quantum computer, the largest and most advanced unit ever built. Organic in its nature, and powered by the human mind, it was a creation unlike any other. Human beings had already reached the point where the use of internal cybernetics allowed them total access to the Internet, letting them plug into a constant stream of wireless communication jacks and nodes that orbited the Earth. It was a brilliant and simple idea to hook an AI powered quantum network into this system. The human mind is a marvel of nature, after all, a computer that rivals its quantum counterparts in complexity and design. It was only natural that we, as a species, needed to take that next step, to supplement our nature with our ingenuity, and because of it, we created a machine that was tantamount to God.

With literally infinite computing power and access to all of the hopes, dreams, ideas and intellect of humanity, Legacy was able to allow us access to a fountain of knowledge previously undreamed of. Imagination became reality as fabricators, automated labs; human and robotic labor, brilliance, art, science and imagination all became one. It was weeks, only weeks, not months or years or decades, but mere weeks, before Legacy gave us the stars back. Space flights, first to the satellites in orbit, then to the stations beyond, then even farther, to the moon, were accomplished with artful precision. Continent sized Mass Drivers launched hundreds of thousands of automated worker satellites into space, all of which then built factories and refineries in orbit, then on the moon, and more, created a stable web of systems that resolved the resource crisis. Soon, humanity had colonies in space, on the moon, on Mars and the moons of Jupiter, and within a century, the population had grown from the thirty billion that inhabited the Earth to nearly triple that number thanks to massive leaps forward in gene technology. Crippling and devastating defects and diseases were eradicated. The human life expectancy tripled with the advent of organ cloning technology and neural mapping

Dozens of projects sprang up, funded by the infinite well that was Legacy and its unending resources. Nuclear fusion, high-speed warp travel, terraforming, all became playthings to Legacy. As it grew, individual AI units melded with human consciousness began to spring up, the tens of billions of neural uplinks slowly but surely becoming primitive, individual beings wrapped around the human minds that housed them, forming symbiotic bonds between man and machine, each working in tandem with one another and with the greater whole that was Legacy.

And during it all, humanity never stopped growing. With every birth Legacy grew smarter and more powerful. Its drive to reach the zenith of human development pushed it to defy the very laws of nature. It refused to acknowledge limitation; it pushed and expanded and reached out to touch every corner of the solar system.

Even as humanity entered a golden age of discovery with the creation of Legacy, the combined consciousness had never stopped pushing for that most basic of our desires, of our destiny. It never stopped pushing for the stars. For all of its advancements in machinery, spacecraft, medicine, agriculture, technology and biology, humanity's destiny seemed to exist still beyond Legacy's grasp. For all of its experiments, tests, simulations, advancements, and successes, Legacy simply could not escape the centuries it would take humanity to reach the next nearest star. Tens of thousands of work hours, trillions in resources, all yielding nothing but dust and wreckage and failure. Humanity despaired, and Legacy faced its first defeat since its inception.

But all of that changed with the discovery of the Protheans.

A small mining colony on Mars, located near its uninhabited southern tip, went from being a community in the hundreds to a city of millions within a year of man's second great discovery. It was a small outpost, even by humanity's standards, but... it held data, small bits of code and precious few bits of ancient technology. Those few touches of a great and forgotten people served to send Legacy into new directions, with new designs and ideas and perceptions. Yet, that wasn't all it revealed.

Beyond the edges of our space, on the little ice-dwarf planet that sat at the rim of our solar system sat a moon called Charon. This little hunk of ice and debris was ignored, by both humanity and Legacy for decades, existing as little more than an unimportant piece of space debris in the great expanse of the Empire. Shame on us for our arrogance. At the core of that icy little rock, hidden away by thousands of years of inactivity and unimportance stood the most incomprehensible piece of advanced technology humanity had ever seen. The Mass Relay. A machine nearly fifteen kilometers long, Legacy initially thought it to be some form of station or craft. But with years of testing and countless work initiatives, this initial assumption was found to be incorrect. The machine itself was so much more, as we came to discover once the massive construct was uncovered and activated. Through a series of seemingly random events, the structure was powered, and as it garnered that power, the massive bloom of energy at it's center grew and expanded, blinding all within sight of it in a brilliant white light.

Violating all known laws of conservation of mass, the Relay generated a field that completely negated all effects of mass, gravity, and atomic structure. Coating whatever passed by the massive gyro in the center in such a field, the machine would then automatically jettison the object at nearly a thousand times Light speed, to a precise point in space any number of light years away. The field generated by the machine negated any effects that would come from a rapid acceleration and deceleration safely before dispersing.

It was unlike anything humanity had ever known. The technology alone was unimaginably advanced, but it worked, and it allowed Legacy to complete its most vaunted of goals.

Even as humanity rejoiced at its success, Legacy worried. Its children, its charge, were a shortsighted race, even with their extended life span. Mankind made plans for years and decades. Legacy had planned out centuries and millennia. It had a vision for humanity, a design as to what humanity's true fate would be. What would it mean to them when they met those who built the Relay? Would they be friendly? Hostile? How dangerous could they be? How powerful? This relay was tens of thousands of years old, and yet more advanced than anything either humanity or Legacy had to offer. This was a problem that had to be rectified.

Within a decade, thousands of human colonies dotted the surrounding star systems, developing at a phenomenal rate, each growing by leaps and bounds. Cities sprung up, built around orbitally-dropped prefab refineries and massive terraforming plants. Core system colonies, like Utopia and Second Earth became strong points across the local cluster, with massive orbital docks and space factories constantly producing an endless supply of resources being pumped back to the core of the Empire.

We adapted and grew, our numbers, our culture, our beliefs and dreams all spanning out beyond the limitations of even the most liberal of minds, and yet for all of our most amazing feats, for all of our glowing achievements, there are also shadows cast by the shining white light of the Charon Relay. For all of its sophistication and invention and exploration, humanity could never quite curb its most primal facets. The drive to conquer, to command and control. The drive to fight and do battle, to accrue wealth and power. Thus, as much as Legacy was the living extension of our will, as was it the whole of our wrath and fear.

Humanity has always excelled in the ways of war. Violence is in our nature, as much as curiosity. Thus, even though Legacy and the Emperor held us as a unified presence, we still looked forth, readying ourselves for the next war, the next battle. If nothing else, space had taught us that there are so many weird, terrifying and dangerous things out there. From the crab-like armored insects that spewed fiery acid that seemed to infest much of Gamma sector to the living plant life found in the Omicron-Precia sector, humanity found many things that left it shaking in the night. To protect us, Legacy created the ATLAS Corps. Advanced Tactics Light Armor Security, it represented humanity's military presence, the men and women dedicated to defending and preserving the human species. They were our defenders, our watchmen against the unknowns of space. Space marines, as they were aptly named by the colonists, became the mainstay of our ground forces, armored from head to toe in thick, heavy combat suits and carrying their M-98 gauss rifles, many saw them as a symbol of our strength on the ground. Nearly ten billion troops system-wide, and more being recruited daily, they were our fist, our shield and our sword. But even they weren't enough.

It was the year 2116 that saw the christening of our first space-based warship, the IFS Zeus. Little more than a ten man exploratory frigate with a missile pod strapped to its nose, it marked the first of what would be many warships. It was a humble beginning, and the IFS Zeus now sits in the Luna Space Memorial as a testament to our drive to protect what is ours. The ships have only gotten bigger. Now, we sit upon a fleet of more than a hundred thousand, the Grand Imperial Armada, made up of seventy different battle groups, each consisting of hundreds of frigates, cruisers, heavy cruisers and destroyers, backed by powerful seven-hundred meter long battleships armed with hundreds of scram cannons, mass accelerators, rail cannons, Novalith-class missile bays, and full drone fighter contingents. Fifteen hundred meter long dreadnoughts support them, each armed with four powerful "planer-killer" Gauss siege cannons and dozens of secondary and tertiary systems and kilometer mobile station-carriers filled with hundreds of fighters and fighter drones build the core of each fleet. But even they pale in comparison to the great flagship, the IFS Leviathan, a three kilometer monstrosity that exists as the Emperor's personal warship, a construct so massive that it holds it's own gravitational field, a massive mobile base filled with repair bays, supply depots, administrative and military labs and hospitals, complete with factories and hydroponics capable of functioning for years without resupply. A wonder of mankind, unique in every way, and truly a floating city all it's own.

Humanity stood at its pinnacle, at a point so far from our humble beginnings. In the two-hundred odd years that mankind had been exploring the stars, we had gone from being little more than slum-driven slaves to the elite to a true universal superpower. Legacy had ensured our existence, our success amongst the stars, the realization that we could have no other destiny. No gods or fates dictated our future. We made our own, forged from the fires of progress and tempered against the heat of the stars, we grew vast, and we grew powerful. Yet... for all of our miracles and advancements and achievements, for all of our exploration and discovery, we found ourselves alone. Two centuries of aggressive expansion, and yet we found ourselves seeing only debris and ancient ruins. For all of our growth, we hadn't found anything to indicate that we weren't the only intelligent life in the galaxy.

All of that changed when the human colony of Shanxi, little more than a township established for the purpose of studying a then-inactive Mass Relay discovered orbiting the other side of the Feng-system's sun, became the centerpiece for the humanity's first encounter with an alien race. The first inactive relay humanity had found since the Charon gateway, it piqued both ours and Legacy's interest. Though a point of discovery- and accredited as such, Shanxi was little more than a footnote within the Empire, bordering the very edges of controlled space.

On December 6th, 2217, seven ships of unknown make and model jumped in on top of the Relay 314 research station. They jumped in at 0200 hours, Imperial Standard Time. By 0300 hours, the station, its five frigate defense force and the nearly two hundred civilian scientists were dead. Several dozen escape ships were launched towards the Shanxi colony, but only two survived the chasing cruisers. Those dozen survivors barely managed to make it back to the secured facility when the alien craft descended into low orbit and launched several smaller shuttles to ground level.

Strange, distinctly avian aliens reminiscent of the velociraptors seen in history holovids, wearing light armor (by Imperial standards) and carrying some form of hybrid solid-state/energy weapons invaded the small bunker and township. There, they were intercepted by Imperial space marines. The fighting was brutal. The Gauss slugs from Imperial M-98s met with the shaved fletchett munitions of the aliens. Bodies littered the streets, and while marines had the advantage of armor and firepower, the invaders had numbers backing them, and after four days of heavy urban warfare and orbital shelling, the city no longer stood, in its place a shattered ruin...

It was sheer luck that the bulk of the civilians had been sent to the deep, underground shelters below the colony. That shelter saved their lives. The colony defenders weren't nearly so lucky. Supply depots, defensive bunkers, barracks and munitions stockpiles were lost to the orbital shelling. Even then, they managed to hold for another two days. At the end their empty rifles were used as little more than clubs and spears. They held, though, and when all was seemingly lost and their will nearly broken, when they found themselves looking down the barrels of countless enemy weapons, it was then that the Imperial Fleet arrived.

The alien ships were torn apart, and the troops on the ground were hunted to extinction. Major General Williams, the leader of the colony and of the marines, who had been killed during that last assault, was given a posthumous memorum-operandi, a statue in the Imperial Palace on Earth, and was known as one of humanity's greatest heroes. The few surviving marines and colonists were shipped back to the core systems for recuperation, and through it all, no other contact was made by whatever alien force had originally sent the small patrol fleet.

Humanity had found intelligent life in the universe. It was a shame that it seemed hostile, but at the same time gratifying to know that we outmatched them so infinitely. Or so we thought.

Three weeks later a much larger force of nearly ninety ships, including what appeared to be a fleet of capital-class warships jumped into the Shanxi system. They were intercepted by the 51st Colonial Defense Fleet, a flotilla of seventy seven ships, including two of the latest Wyvern-class dreadnaughts and five Chimera-class station-carriers. There was a pause, a calm before the storm, before both fleets engaged with equal ferocity. Novalith missiles mixed with twenty-kilo ferrite slugs, the former capable of cleaving apart the Turian spacecraft while the latter impacted upon with enough force to shred heavy armor of the Imperial warships. Clouds of fighters cut down frigates and light cruisers only to be consumed in storms of micro-millimeter fletchett rounds while Dreadnaughts hammered away at one another using weapons capable of shattering continents. Heavy cruisers and battleships traded fire, evenly matched pound for pound, with the former and it's powerful shields pressed against the latter as they laid down withering torrents of fire. Tens of thousands died in the brutal engagement, and when the two fleets separated, both badly wounded, the battlefield left behind burned with the skeletons of dozens of ships and hundreds of fighters.

A day of silence followed as an uneasy peace settled over the battlefield. Ships, both alien and Imperial stood on opposite sides, the former between the colony and the local Relay, the latter between them and the colony. Weapons aimed at both sides of the arena tracked the smallest of movements as tensions ran high, both the alien fleet and their Imperial counterparts ready to re-engage at a moment's notice. Imperial reinforcements were rallied outside of an opposing relay, and more alien ships jumped in through 314, and it seemed that the battle would be met once more, only as soon as the two forces received the support they needed. But, in an odd and almost fortuitous turn of events, the alien fleet had asked for parlay, a simple gesture that, after no small consideration by the Imperial Senate and the Emperor, was endorsed by the Imperials themselves. What encouraged such a gesture remains unknown. The exact reasoning behind it could be attributed by to any number of points, but it's most widely believed that the aliens, then identified as the Citadel Races, were unprepared for the level of violence the Imperials had entreated upon them. Regardless of the logic behind the move, however, a ceasefire was called as both powers met at a neutral table.

Diplomatic ships, envoys marked under a banner of peace, traveled between the two hulking military machines. Dozens of small communiques were exchanged as ambassadors of the Emperor and the Citadel spoke. Ships on both sides watched carefully with weapons ready, from then identified Turian cruisers to human battleships, uncountable reds and blues glowed across the field, markers of the countless heavy weapons primed for combat.

For three days both fleets stood opposing one another, the Imperial force and the Citadel fleet simply waiting and watching. A thousand light years away, human and the then-identified Citadel Council spoke of diplomatic matters over a tense table. The representatives of the Emperor were incensed over the incident, and rightly so. The Council, in their eyes, had invaded sovereign Imperial space and tried to enforce their then-unrecognized authority over Imperial citizens. The Council argued that technically it was their space originally, but the Imperials had none of it. Semantics, they said, would not alleviate the hundreds of innocent lives lost to the hands of the Citadel fleet. Negotiations were long, brutal and drawn out. Both sides were more than agitated, and the Imperials were on the verge of declaring all-out war in the beginning, but eventually a consensus was reached. The Turians would be forced to offer reparations for the lost Imperial lives and equipment, and the Empire would recognize what was classified as "sovereign" Citadel space. While keeping any colonies already established, they agreed not to push any deeper into Citadel space. In return, they received access to the rest of the Mass Relay system, a fully vetted Embassy on the Citadel to represent Imperial interests and access to unclaimed "wild"space for continued expansion.

It was an unprecedented agreement, as the Empire had not, in fact, agreed to join the Citadel Races as a whole, preferring to maintain their own sovereignty. Because of this fact, they were exempt from the Treaty of Farixen, something that no amount of negotiation could rectify partially due to the admittedly hostile actions of the Turian fleet and the fact that, due to the Treaty's restrictive nature against artificial intelligences, it violated a number of Imperial doctrines concerning the rights of artificial beings, which the Empire recognized as sentient individuals instead of machines. In place, the two powers agreed upon a number of concessions between them, including a wide number of clauses concerning artificial life forms, fleet actions, allowances for trade and commercial sales of goods. This became known as the Treaty of Shanxi, and served as the functional basis for all future interactions between the Empire and the Citadel on any official scale.

Across the Empire, emotions were varied towards the alien races that inhabited our galaxy. Many were afraid, rightly so, given their violent entry into human culture and controlled space, and even more were calling for blood in those early days. Many marines and civilians had lost their lives at Shanxi, men and women with families, children who would never grow old, all killed by the Turian fleet's violent and unwarranted incursion into Imperial space. Humanity held no love for the Citadel races, and much of the populace was unsettled by the Emperor's decision not to go to war with the space-based superpower. Rioting had broken out in some areas of lesser repute within the Empire, and while swiftly put down, it was still a testament to the outrage of many. Even after the heavy reparations and gifts given by the Citadel as an apology, several splinter groups and factions actively sought harm towards any alien race within human territory.

Decades later, some enmity remained over the conclusion of the First Contact War, while relations between humanity and the bulk of Citadel races had eased considerably. Even with the allowance of humans to settle in some Citadel space and vice versa, there was still much racism and disquiet towards non-Imperial aliens within the core systems. With the Empire's inclusion of the Krogan some years later, however, the initial shock of aliens within galactic space had faded considerably. Much of mankind was open to the idea of intelligent non-human life by that point, so that the expected outrage over the inclusion of aliens within the then purely human Empire was much less than expected. Although some resistance remained, the bulk of humanity had come to a more positive consensus over the issue.

Over the next forty years, the Empire and the Council clashed on a number of issues, ranging from the Empire's aggressive and often heavy-handed methods when dealing with rogue states and independent races, to their use of "planet cracker" mining operations that literally ripped hundred kilometer chunks of planetary surface off world for orbital reprocessing. More than once the Empire and the Turian Hierarchy clashed over a number of issues, from sentient rights violations to the Empire's open acceptance of the Krogan. While the Asari and Salarian representatives tended to stay neutral, the Empire and the Turians both fought one another viciously over even the smallest disputes.

There was no small amount of outrage when the Empire approached the Krogan with an offer of vassalage in exchange for a cure to the genophage. Since the Empire was constantly clashing with the Turians, and it's lukewarm reception of the Citadel as a whole, the Krogan found themselves preferring the Empire's brand of vassalage to the Citadel, even though many thought the promise of a cure to be an empty offering. The nihilistic mindset of the race combined with the offer of good pay, free weapons and constant combat was embraced by many of the tribal clans had more effect upon their decision to join the Empire than anything else. Many of the lesser Council races strongly objected to the Empire's practices concerning their damaging mining efforts and their inclusion of the "dangerous" Krogan race to their already hefty arsenal. This, combined with the aggressive expansion into the Skyllian Verge, caused no small amount of tension with the Batarian Hegemony.

At that point, the two states were openly clashing over colonization rights, and the Citadel, though present in the Terminus sector, had no official pull there, was unable to tender negotiations between either the minor government or the Empire. With the advent of the Citadel's refusal of aid in defending what the Hegemony called Batarian interests from Imperial incursion, caused the semi-sovereign Batarian Hegemony to pull out of the Citadel altogether. Shortly thereafter, pirate and slaver raids against human settlements increased significantly, escalating into first the massacre of Mindoir, then to the massive attack on the colony of Elysium, and finally, at the battle of Torfan, where the Empire claimed to find absolute proof of the Hegemony's machinations in encouraging the brutal war-by-proxy against a large number of civilian interests. While the Hegemony claims that the evidence was fabricated, the Empire immediately declared all out war against the Hegemony and it's subsidiaries. Within weeks, fleet level action was seen at the fringes of Batarian space. Subsequently, the Empire was able to rest spacial control over the majority of the Batarian colony worlds, but are bogged down in street level guerrilla warfare on a number of worlds, which has broken the momentum of the Imperial initiative. As it stands, the Empire and the Hegemony are still exchanging hostilities to this day.

Imperial relations with the Quarian race have always been strained, due to the Empire's proliferation of AI technology and the bias of the Quarian people against that selfsame technology. While neither faction has any open hostilities towards each other, the Migrant Fleet has never been spotted in or near any Imperial controlled sector of space, and because of the obvious differences in their philosophical and technological policies, there is a distinctly negative undercurrent between Imperial officials and their Quarian counterparts, and while one can occasionally find individual Quarians within the farther reached areas of the colonial frontier, there has never been a recorded Quarian visitor on any human core world.

Though the Quarians and Imperials maintain agreements concerning trade and the harvesting of a select few minerals found almost exclusively within Imperial space, the interactions between either people on any official level is kept to a minimum. There have been instances of Quarians on Imperial ships every so often, but this in itself is rare. Admittedly, there is a strong bias throughout the known galaxy and especially within the Citadel Races against the Empire's AI policy, which oftentimes borders racism quite closely, it tends to be more prevalent between conservative Quarians and their human counterparts. Many Quarians are of the opinion that the Empire is playing a highly irresponsible game with the lives of everyone in the galaxy, given their refusal to even moderate their expansion into bio-organic quantum computing and their recently announced eighth generation AI prototypes.

This has lead to a number of quiet protests held by a mixture of races wary of the Empire's motives outside of their embassy, and while no violence has yet to occur, there is a tense undercurrent that has continually marred relations between mankind and the greater galaxy as a whole.

There has been a marked interest within the Empire seeking to make contact with the sentient Geth race, given the interesting situational similarities that can be drawn from their mutual use of AI, but as the only relays to and from the Perseus Veil deep within Council-controlled space, the Empire has since been stymied from moving forward with that agenda. Though the issue stands as a hot-button topic between the two, it has since found itself slowly moving to the metaphoric back burner as tensions between the Batarian Hegemony and the Empire exploded. Though the topic still makes it's way before the Citadel Council every so often, humanity has stopped pushing the issue nearly as much as it had been in the past. While there is some concern over this fact, given how staunch the Empire was in it's attempts to gain entry rights to the Perseus Veil prior to the outbreak of the war, though most decry it as a simple changing of immediate priorities and many doubt that the issue is well and truly dropped.

Since the inauguration of the Treaty of Shanxi, the Empire and the Citadel have held a somewhat cordial respect for one another, regardless of their political agendas, and while the face of the political arena held much contention between humanity and the Citadel, more than a few major issues had been resolved under the guise of backroom politicking. This has gone a long way to quiet the majority of the negative feelings felt between the Empire and the Turians. While still not friendly, the two races hold a cold respect for one another. Beyond the standard peace accords, both the Empire and the Citadel have open trade and limited free travel between the two, and while the core systems of the Empire are still restricted to Imperial military craft, more and more alien traders have been allowed access into Imperial space in recent years, as well as the growth of alien populations upon Imperial colonies and the appearance of more humans outside of Imperial space.

-Lyn, James; "The Empire, Then and Now.", _Imperial Citizen Magazine_ #1633 Jan, 2240: 93-97


	2. Flashpoints Critical

Elation! Chapter One Part One is here!

Hope you enjoy it!

000

Commander John James Shepard stood at the aft cockpit view port, his tired eyes staring out over the vast emptiness of space, his mind adrift on the warp currents that shifted through their brilliant blue and red hues. Around him hummed billions in Imperial credits in advanced electronic equipment, the thousand blinking lights and gauges casting an orange hue over the whole of the tiny compartment, bathing him in their iridescent glow. He was uneasy, a fact made obvious by his frown, hidden from the other three occupants of the ship's bridge.

Beside him Imperial Flight Lieutenant Jeff Moreau, known to him as Joker, sat by, idly calculating the next highpoint warp drop-off and his co-pilot and gunner, Lt. Kaiden Alenko. Neither seemed particularly impressive, which was a bit comical considering Joker was widely considered one of the best Imperial pilots in the fleet and Alenko was ranked as a Class 6 Vanguard, despite his outdated psyneural augs. Between them, they made up some of the best the Empire had to offer. In fact, all of the ship's crew, from the bridge techs to the small marine contingent fell into that purview, handpicked as the best and brightest from both the Imperial navy and the ATLAS corps to serve upon this ship, the IFS Normandy SR-1.

Why? Simple. It was the most advanced ship in space, a Tech-3 type stealth assault frigate, and one of the Empire's most prized achievements. Filled to the brim with a combination of alpha-class AI systems, stealth cloaking technology and an array of hyper-advanced sensors, it was a culmination of the best humanity had to offer wrapped into one tight package. The ship's drive core alone, the first of the Prometheus line, was considered a technological marvel, a trillion-credit expenditure capable of zero-point warping the Normandy to any point in a solar system, all while giving off zero emissions or heat. The advanced shield arrays and mixed weapons/ECM warfare package could, in theory, place it above a standard Imperial battleship in a standup fight.

The ship was under the command of Captain David Edward Anderson, the hero of the Verge, a veteran of over a hundred space encounters with hostile forces and one of the prime candidates for Fleet Admiral status. He was a hero within the Empire, a household name in military circles and one of the few living humans to have a statue of himself in the Imperial Palace on Earth. It was little wonder why he was selected as the CO of the Normandy, given his credentials, but also more than a bit disconcerting to the crew. Men like Anderson don't get assigned to babysit experimental frigates, no matter how advanced. He should have been out directing his own battle group somewhere, but here he was.

And so was Commander Shepard. While not a man of such renown as the Captain, Shepard had his own niche in the military. Known far and wide as one the best infiltrators within the black bag sector of the ATLAS corps, a man who was supposedly accountable for over a thousand battlefield kills and dozens of successful military operations. Most of them, however, paled in comparison to his claim to fame during the infamous Siege of Elysium, in which he and his team successfully managed to hold off nearly thirty six hours of continuous attacks by Batarian mercs and pirates, even going so far as to rally a ragtag militia that was had held the line throughout the brutal assault. Because of their actions, they'd managed to protect nearly ninety percent of the colony's populace just long enough for the fleet to come in and wipe out the alien presence.

Men like Anderson didn't come on shakedown runs, and Shepard wasn't so arrogant as to ignore his own place within the halls of the ship. They didn't send him to babysit new Imperial toys, no matter how expensive or fancy. ATLAS command was much more prudent than that. No, there was something off about this whole "shakedown" mission, but what, he didn't know.

Oh, well, perhaps it had something to do with the resident Turian on board. There was that, Shepard had to admit. If anyone asked, he would be the first to admit to being impressed by what the alien represented, being a rather well known Spectre across both Imperial and Citadel space and, despite being Turian, well respected within both. It had something to do with him flying what amounted into a space dingy into the middle of an Imperial colony under siege by Batarian slavers. Long story short, he ended up being tantamount in the defeat of the slavers, thereby saving the colony in the process, all of his own volition. When the Imperial fleet arrived hours later, they were surprised to find the town in an uproar over the event, going so far as to claim the Turian a hero and the only reason the raid was repelled. Though the Spectre had left by that point, his name still made it into the Legacy newsnet sometime later that week and he was openly thanked by the Emperor for his efforts.

It had gone a long way towards a more open and friendly diplomatic stance between the Citadel and the Empire, so much so, apparently, that it earned him the right to hitch a ride on the Normandy for whatever reason he needed to. Whatever it was, though, it added another layer of skepticism amongst the crew. Joker didn't like, him, unsurprisingly, mostly because Joker didn't like anyone all that much. Alenko seemed fairly neutral and so did much of the rest of the crew. He knew that Pressly wasn't a fan. That was expected given his history with the Citadel races, but Pressly was also hand-chosen by the Captain to serve as his XO, a judgment Shepard felt appropriate, given how good an officer the man was.

Shepard mostly tuned out the byplay between the pilot and the gunner. Joker's disdain for the Spectre was already well known; he had no doubt the Turian was aware of it and was antagonizing Joker. The Infiltrator shook his head in exasperation. One would think that between the two they'd be professional enough not to barb each other, he thought, at least not while on mission. But... Joker did tend to bring out the mischief in people, there was no denying it. He paused a moment, reflecting on just how true that was before turning from the pilot's cabin. His netlink had informed him that the Captain wanted his presence in the rear communications deck. The information flitting across his eye, the synapses in his ocular nerves manipulated through his personal AI, created a thin, glowing line across the ground, directing him to the appropriate room, not that he needed direction. It wasn't like the ship was particularly large or winding, after all.

Shepard left quickly, moving down the bridge towards the rear deck, passing Navigator Pressly, who was talking quietly into a ship comm. Engineer Adams, one of Pressly's friends from the academy, if Shepard remembered correctly, was expressing some speculation as to the mission. The Commander stopped and placed a hand on the Navigator's shoulder.

"Sir!" The elderly officer nearly jumped, saluting as he went rigid. Shepard merely nodded to him.

"Navigator. Something the matter?" The infiltrator asked, eyebrow raised. His hand dropped from Pressly's shoulder and found its way behind his back.

"No sir! Just conferring with my fellow officer, sir." Shepard nodded, and glanced to the comm. He gave the Navigator a pointed look.

"I understand your concerns, Navigator, yours and Chief Engineer Adams'. I'm going to be looking into it shortly, as I've been summoned by the Captain. However, I would advise against openly discussing said concerns over a ship comm. It can be... problematic if someone overhears you. Use your netlink, if you should you feel the need to do so. Understood?"

Pressly gave a sharp salute and a sir for good measure. Shepard nodded and returned the gesture. "Pressly, I know you aren't easy with the whole situation. You aren't the only one with issues regarding our orders. These are the best and brightest the Empire has to offer. They wouldn't pull us out for just a shakedown run. Captain has been tight lipped over our orders for a reason, and I suspect that after our next jump we'll be finding out just what's going on. Please, be patient until then. Anderson isn't one to guide you wrong" The Commander finished quietly. He glanced back towards the communications deck before looking at the older man.

"I know, sir. I understand. My apologies, Commander." The older man looked somewhat chastened, and Shepard patted him on the shoulder.

"Have faith, Navigator. The Emperor protects."(1) Shepard, turned from Pressly, letting him go back to his duties. He caught sight of Jenkins and the ship's CMO, Dr, Chakwas, a veteran of some thirty odd years of military service. Shepard could only shake his head at the former, though. He was still green, despite his immaculate record. He'd scored quite high on the ATLAS exams, and had been trained as spec ops, like Shepard and Alenko and the dozen other marines on the Normandy, and while he hadn't had much field time, the man had ranked A++ in his weapons and tactics scores, which had earned him the right to fly on the Normandy. He was glad to see the boy was willing, if a bit too eager, and gave a small grin to Chakwas as he passed them. He'd heard her trying to dissuade him from his notion of the "romance" of the battlefield, but Shepard couldn't fault the boy for his illusions. Imperial propaganda tended to paint ATLAS as the first, best hope of humanity, and a lot of Imperial programming went to lengths to reinforce that image. He himself never found it to be all that helpful, outside of getting overconfident troopers killed, but more often than not recruits didn't shake that image until they were hip deep in sludge on some swamp planet somewhere. Regardless, he genuinely didn't have the time or inclination to disillusion the boy. Reality would do that soon enough.

Slipping onto the communications deck, the infiltrator made his way to the only other figure in the room. The solitary Spectre. The room was dark enough without the ambient glow from the holo-comms; they cast an eerie glow over the bland, circular bridge.

"Nihilus." Shepard nodded, taking a place across from the Turian. A sign of wary respect amongst professionals. The man nodded back, his mandibles clicking in that odd way Turians did.

"Shepard." The alien responded, his tone cordial, if a bit arrogant. "I was hoping to get the chance to speak with you alone. I've heard of your exploits, Commander. Elysium was some nasty business. I have to admit that I was impressed with your resolution of that conflict. You made the best use of what you had and managed to cobble together an impressive defense with nothing but a handful of ragtags, and thanks to your actions, you ended up saving how many thousands of your Imperial citizens?" The Turian said. Shepard's eyes narrowed a bit.

"Do you have a point, Spectre?" The human said, his voice calm, despite the sharp words. Nihilus looked at him with a raised brow, or what Shepard assumed was the Turian equivalent, but said nothing to the tone, instead continuing on after a moment's pause.

"The point, Commander, is that you've been shown to be equally talented and courageous. You've proven yourself time and again on the battlefield, and your scores are most impressive in both technical skills and tactics. You're considered something akin to the best your Empire has to offer, which is why the Council suggested your presence on this particular mission," the avian alien said calmly, turning away from the Commander.

"I see. Which means what, exactly?" What went unsaid was that, while both the Empire and the Citadel were on comparatively good terms, the latter had no power or authority over any decision made concerning an Imperial mission, on an Imperial ship, in Imperial space. The fact that Nihilus made the point alone was more than informative as to just how convoluted this situation was likely to become.

"Let me ask you this. What do you know of Eden Prime? I hear it's quite beautiful." Shepard could almost hear the grin on Nihilus's face. His eyes narrowed curiously.

"I'm a marine, not a tourist, Spectre. Your point?" The reply was harsher than the Commander had wanted, but he was quickly growing tired of these word games the Turian seemed to so enjoy.

"Mmm. True, and true to form, Commander. But the fact remains that Eden Prime is considered one of, if not the premier frontier colony in Imperial space. It's become something of a symbol for your Empire, has it not? Proof of humanity's ability to thrive in deep space?" Shepard nodded, slightly, and grunted an affirmative.

"What of it?" The Commander queried, curiosity overriding his initial annoyance. The alien grinned at him.

"It is everything, Commander. Quite possibly one of the most important icons in the Empire, once we're finished there." a voice said from behind Shepard. He turned and immediately snapped a salute to Captain Anderson. The Captain returned it casually. "At ease, Commander."

"Sir, might I ask what you mean?" Shepard asked politely, his tone much more cordial and forthcoming.

"I think it's time to inform the Commander of everything that's going on, Captain." Nihilus said as an aside. Anderson nodded his assent, and turned to the fore comms display. The display immediately lit up with a high quality hologram of Eden Prime. The image zoomed in, focusing on an area of coastal development roughly eighteen kilometers in size.

"I agree. Commander, I'm sure you have a number of questions as to why we have a Spectre on board, amongst other things, like why we have a full crew and drop contingent and why, on a shakedown run, we're freebooting a number of A++ Special Forces operatives. The answer to all of these questions is, as you've no doubt deduced, connected." The Captain lifted his arm and the image changed, shifting to what appeared to be some kind of dig site. "Three weeks ago an agricultural survey team identified what appeared to be a native ruin of some sort. Upon investigation and excavation, we ended up finding another Prothean facility, one that appears to be in nearly perfect condition. When we finally managed to get it open, we found a device of some kind."

The image shifted again, showing a strange, tower like artifact that glowed green in the sunlight.

"From what we understand, it's a Prothean beacon, perhaps a data cache or map, something of that nature. Given that all galactic civilization owes its thanks to Prothean technology, you can see how something like a data cache would be invaluable to the galactic community as a whole." Nihilus piped in. Shepard turned to him, but said nothing.

"Which brings us to the reason of Nihilus's presence. In recent years the Empire and the Council have been working towards a more friendly diplomatic situation. That said, while the Empire is a power in it's own right, the Citadel still holds a much greater number of specialists on ancient Prothean technology. The Empire approached the Council with this discovery and, through the hard work of our ambassadors and the Emperor, a deal was struck between our two nations. This brings me to the reason of our presence." Captain Anderson led on. Shepard nodded, finally getting the picture.

"We're going to pick it up, aren't we?" He asked, and Anderson nodded.

"That's correct Commander. The deal we struck dictated that the beacon will be moved to a joint research facility for study. We get access to the Citadel specialists, and they get access to Imperial resources. Both the Empire and the Citadel reap the benefits, and through this we can go a long way to mending a number of rather bad relations between our two nations."

"Which is also in part of why I'm here. The Council requested that one of their own be present for the pickup to aid in security. I was picked because of my shared past with your Empire and my popularity amongst the Imperial citizenry. The same goes for you. You were personally chosen by your Emperor, if I'm to understand it correctly, for this mission. That says a lot for your ability and skill. The fact that he had anything to do with this mission should speak for itself as to its importance." The Spectre finished.

"I see. I'm at the Emperor's disposal, Captain. Just say th-" Shepard found himself cut off as Joker's voice came over the comms relay.

"Captain? We have a situation here, coming in straight from Eden Prime. You better see this, sir!" All could hear the tension in his voice.

"Patch it through, Joker" came the Captain's terse reply. The display changed to what appeared to be a battleground. Over the speakers the three could hear gunshots, pocketed by the railing of an M500 chain gun and a number of what sounded like anti-tank weapons. In the background they saw a massive, twenty foot tall Phalanx mech, its reverse jointed legs pounding across the ground as the four-barreled chain gun on its right arm railed again. A single soldier, dressed in the garb of an ATLAS heavy space marine, the dark green of the heavily plated power suit came into view, the amber eyes of the gas-mask like helm glowing in the din of the evening light.

"This is-" A burst of static interrupted the next few words. The speaker was clearly female, her voice apparent even through the mechanical speakers of her suit. The unit cut back in, "We have heavy enemy infantry activity planeside, I repeat, we have heavy enemy infantry dropping in planeside! They're Geth, according to the Legacy d-base, armed with heavy energy based-" the words cut out again, and faded back, "-ost the Vindicators early on, some kind of pulse weapon knocked out all the hover units! The guns still fire but they're sitting ducks to those huge robots walking all over our fortifications! They're ripping through our Phalanx units like tissue paper! We need reinforcements!" The soldier looked away for a moment, before cursing violently and letting off a rattling volley from her gauss Suppression HMG, firing wildly from one arm. An explosion shook the camera near her, and the cameraman, whoever it was, looked quickly to a light infantry space marine whose legs were sheared off at the thighs. The man's screams echoed through the speakers a moment before the camera reoriented itself.

"God damnit! Get some AA down on those fucking dropships!" The woman screamed, before turning back to the camera. "Get any fleet resources in the area to Eden Prime ASAP! We need some air support! Those fucking dropships are eating our AA and hammering us hard! I repeat, we need-"

"What the hell is that!" A voice screamed out off camera, and the image started to fade to static. Some kind of interference was infiltrating the local net, but not fast enough for to escape the seeing eye of the camera. Five massive black fingers seemed to reach down from the foggy clouds above, black as death and each massive in their own right. They seemed to be reaching down, but the image faded to static long before a clear picture could be seen.

All three paused for a moment, before Captain Anderson looked to both Shepard and the Spectre, a grim frown on his face.

"Joker, I want you to put us on a direct intercept course for Eden Prime and I want us going in hot. Send an alert back to fleet command and sound general quarters. Tell the marine detachments to arm up and head down to the drop bay and notify Engineering to make sure that the core is running silent and that the Mako APCs are prepped for a combat drop." The Captain called over the open intercom, and then turned to the Commander.

"Shepard, I'm giving you Alenko and Jenkins. Make sure you're prepped and ready, we'll be dropping you close to the last confirmed location of the beacon. I want you three to recover it. All other objectives are secondary priority. I'll upload command initiative to your netlink, so you should be able to take over any still-functioning drones that you run across, and you'll have the authority to requisition ground forces should you find them. You must acquire and defend that beacon at all cost!" Shepard gave a sharp salute and turned towards the door. Nihilus caught him before he could leave.

"Commander, I'll be accompanying your team on the drop. Given the nature of the situation, I feel my skills would be used best in assisting you." The Turian's words rang true, and given his status and rank, and his reputation, Shepard couldn't argue against the offered help. He simply nodded in acknowledgment before turning and leaving. The Spectre was soon to follow.

000

"Alright, we'll be dropping in on grid eight, roughly three klicks from the initial dig site! We've got readings on a sizable force between us and the site, and even more appearing via dropship activity near the spaceport two klicks east of our position! Our objectives are to collect and hold the port and find, prep and guard the beacon for extraction!" Shepard called over the gushing winds of the lower atmosphere that filtered in through the hot-drop bay on the Normandy's underside. His mask was open, split down seamless hinges, showing his face, the helm hanging above, with the side plates flipped out and the re-breather unit hanging loose over his mouth.

Alenko nodded, tightly hugging his M98 to his chest, the rectangular weapon clattering as it caught flickers of wind shear against the light armor of his ATLAS vanguard suit, the segmented light plate and nano-fiberweave covering sucked tight against his skin. He'd already closed his helm, his left arm lining with glowing purple filaments, the internal bio-amp unit humming with power.

Jenkins looked sick, scared and worried. Shepard knew the boy was from Eden, and he knew it was dangerous for him to be getting his feet wet on this mission, but he didn't have a choice in the matter. Captain Anderson had assigned the weapons specialist to Shepard, and he would make do. With a heavy hand, the Commander patted Jenkins on his shoulder, a reassuring act that made the trooper stand a bit straighter. It was in that moment that Shepard felt a pang of regret for not saying anything to the boy earlier, but it was too late to worry about it now.

Shepard closed his helm, the segmented sections melding together with their seamless magnetic links, closing in his head completely and blocking out the wind. He looked to his soldiers, first to Alenko, who only nodded, and then to Jenkins, who was shaking slightly.

"Relax, Jenkins. Don't tense up and keep yourself situated. Mind your combat scanner and your netlink, and you'll be fine. For all of the fighting that's going on, it looks like the major metropolitan areas are being left alone. Whatever it is, they're focusing in on the dig site and the area around it. Sooner we secure that, the sooner the fleet can blast them off Eden." Shepard said through the uplink, even as he ran a last minute check on his systems. Jenkins clutched his weapon, a massive Suppression HMG with a belt fed clip drawn from the armored munitions pack resting against his back, and nodded to him as well.

Shepard, for his part, checked his own weapon, a Longbow A10 Scram Rifle, one of the most powerful sniper-class weapons available to ATLAS infiltrators. With its twenty round clip and AI-guided correction algorithms, it could punch a hole through eight inches of steel plate. The weapon was a rail gun, flicking four inch long tungsten sabots at nearly twelve kilometers per second through a floating, frictionless barrel and sighted with a ZX-type rangefinder scope, had seen him through most of his career.

His netlink came alive, technical readouts, weather patterns and battlefield conditions all rolling across his vision as his personal AI fed the data to his mind. In the distance he could see flashes of artillery and lines of tracer ammo, with the occasional whomp of AA rounds in the background. He could see the silhouettes of Spitfire VTOL air superiority fighters screaming across the sky, chasing or being chased by what looked like massive hornets, sans the wings. Enemy dropships, Shepard assumed. Dangerous, and impressive, given that they seemed to be actively dropping units even as they fired back at the Spitfires.

The Normandy closed in. He watched the distance tick off on his HUD, and the overlaid drop zone markers paint themselves onto the ground. Nihilus walked up beside them, his ovoid helm locked on tightly and his weapon, a shotgun of some make, standing at the ready.

"I'll be dropping in a bit ahead of you, Commander, to do some scouting. Anything I find will get transmitted back to you via your netlink. Keep your eyes open and watch for snipers, as the DZ is lined with high rocks and debris. Good luck and I'll see you on the other side!" The words cut through to Shepard's comm.

"Don't get yourself shot, Spectre. Your Citadel wouldn't be happy if I had to drag your ass back in a body bag!" Shepard shot back, already getting pumped on combat stims and adrenaline for the upcoming operation.

"Commander, this is Normandy, do you read?" Joker's voice came in over the netlink, and Shepard sent back an affirmative. "We're going to be hitting the drop zone in sixty. Scans tell us that ATLAS has the bulk of the enemy diverted at point three, but there are still heavy patrols in the area. Drone activity is still pretty high as well, but we're getting a ping on some holdout marines and a Phalanx near the dig site. I'll mark the location on your map."  
"Confirmed, Joker." Shepard said into the comms, before turning back to eye up the three heavily armed Mako units lined up at the launch bay doors. "What about the strike teams?" He asked a moment later.

"Captain is gonna drop them at point three to back up the troops there. We'll be in the area shooting down dropships and giving fire support. You've got limited marking, so if you give us a line, we'll blast it for you if we're in the area." Joker's voice tensed at the end. The countdown timer for the drop hit fifteen.

"Ready to drop Commander?" Joker said after a moment.

"Confirmed." Shepard said, the magnetic links of the drop pack locking onto his back, the unit slotted in from the racks above. The timer hit five. Shepard tensed. Three. He clutched his weapon. One. He bent his knees. Zero. He launched.

Vertigo set in, the slamming feeling of weightlessness in mid air tossing him as the pack fired, jerking him in his suit and righting him. The ground came up far too fast below him, the overlay trajectory laser marking him as only a dozen meters from the landing zone. His HUD showed elevated life signs from both of his troops, which, given the drop, wasn't unexpected. He watched, seconds ticking past as the Normandy flew away, already a speck in the air, and the distant flaring of the Spectre's drop into the hot zone almost a klick away. The ground came up, and his drop pack flared again, kicking him in his suit and slowing his descent greatly.

He landed gracefully, rolling with the impact, as did Alenko and Jenkins, though Jenkins seemed somewhat sloppier than the Lieutenant. He quickly recovered though, his heavy armor clanking a bit as they looked around. A dozen bodies lined the edges of the DZ, some alien, more marine, a dead Phalanx mech, its cockpit torn open by rocket fire, sat like a grim tombstone near the three spec ops. The scent of cooked flesh, human flesh, wafted through the air from the bodies, some were charred black while others sat ripped open from heavy, concentrated fire, organs splattered around them.

"I think I'm going to be sick." Shepard turned to see Jenkins leaning over slightly. The Commander wasn't surprised, given that the trooper hadn't ever seen a real combat zone, especially not one where the fighting was particularly vicious. Shepard sighed, stepped up to the heaving private and all but cracked the man over the head with his gauntlet.

"Not here, Jenkins. Suck it up, we have a mission. We can deal with this once we have the beacon, clear?" The words were sharp, but the boy needed direction, not coddling. Jenkins looked at Shepard, then to Alenko and back. He stood, seemed to steel himself, and then nod.

John had seen it before, especially in rookies. Combat shock, caused by the sheer weight of pressure and carnage, hit a lot of troopers hard the first time they see it. Violence far beyond what those pretty recruitment ads for ATLAS even hinted at and worse than what the rather clinical training touched upon in Boot, it was often enough to bring pause to even blooded veterans sometimes. Even with his specialized training, the Commander knew that Jenkins wasn't immune to the effects of seeing or dealing with this level of bloodshed, and as much as he'd like to offer the boy more, there just wasn't time for it right now. There would be a debrief later for the boy, maybe a few sessions of basic trauma counseling with Chakwas, if he really needed it, but they were on mission right now. Fast and dirty would have to do.

"Sorry, Commander. I'm okay... I'll keep it together." The words were shaky, but Shepard took them at face value. There wasn't much choice, regardless, so with a single, silent motion, he signaled that they continue on. Weapons at the ready, the three moved.

Minutes passed, and while they found more corpses, of both the strange synthetic invaders and of space marines, the area was quiet. Most of the bodies seemed to have been shredded, some kind of heavy, high speed energy weapon fire, judging by the amount of charring on the bodies, and given the number of casualties, whatever they were firing was punching through shields and armor like rice paper.

He kneeled at one body, his hand turning it over to get a good look at one of the more intact casualties. His netlink snapped a dozen still images of the wounds, transmitted them straight to the Normandy's AI, and queried Legacy for thoughts. The immediate search came back implying plasma weaponry, at a guess, but nothing definite. He queried again, but the same thing came back. It set the Commander on edge. He stood and looked back to Alenko and Jenkins.

"Keep your eyes and ears open. Whatever they're firing, it's opening us up like tin cans. Stay frosty. Alenko, bring up the rear, and keep your biotics prepped. Jenkins, take the lead. Watch your footing; ground's unstable from all of the weapons fire. The three moved on, away from the dead body, following the overlay's directions. Shepard's HUD blinked, flashing a wireframe over the area. Something was setting off his proximity alarm, and he dropped to his knee. Alenko and Jenkins followed suit.

He motioned for Jenkins to move up, slotting his rifle into his shoulder as he did so. Alenko slipped back behind him, and as one all three slid out from behind the rocky outcropping that sat at the edge of a sizable incline. Nothing, but Shepard stayed low, off to Jenkins left, opposite Alenko. Both sat tight as the heavy weapons specialist made it to the middle ground. Shepard and Alenko slid up behind him in standard serpent formation. The marines calmed a bit. It seemed that whatever had killed those marines had moved on. Alenko stood, and moved to join Shepard when his HUD shocked red. Proximity alarms rang, and three ovoid drones slid out from under the brush.

Alenko barely managed to dive behind cover, and the two watched in stunned horror as Jenkins' body literally came apart under the hail of blue munitions. His shields popped out of existence under the shrieking fire, and his armor, heavy as it was, crumpled like tin. Time slowed down, and Shepard watched in sick fascination as Jenkins' helmet collapsed in and was then torn off, his brain splattering behind him even as his stomach burst out his back. The boy slumped to the ground, dead before he could even raise his weapon.

"Shit!" Alenko's voice tore over Shepard's comm, but the infiltrator had already burst into action. His omni-tool flashed into existence, his AI activating the brute-force systems hack program that sheared through one drone's firewalls and rewrote its targeting FoF. A moment passed as it lined up and opened fire on one of its fellow drones. The other two quickly swiveled; Shepard burst out of his cover and emptied a four inch long tungsten sabot clean through one drone while the other crumpled under a massive wave of biotic power. The third drone detonated seconds later, the hack overloading its generator and frying it.

Shepard was already at the fallen marine by the time Alenko recovered himself enough to join him. Jenkins was dead, torn apart under the vicious drone fire. Neither had ever seen anything like that, never seen heavy fiberweave armor collapse so quickly or shielding die fast enough to pop. The corpse was barely identifiable, and Shepard's eyes narrowed. His face fell into a frown, his gaze distant. Alenko looked to him, and Shepard sighed.

"We can't just leave him here, Commander." The biotic said, his voice heavy with resignation. He'd known Jenkins for some time, had been good friends with the trooper. Shepard stood, but not before tearing away Jenkins' dog tag. The biotic was... John really didn't have a word for it. Alenko and Jenkins had been good friends outside of the corps, and when Jenkins made it into specialist training Alenko had been his primary support. The two were like brothers, in a lot of ways, Alenko playing the old and wise one, Jenkins playing the young, stupid but endearing one. The blow had to be something fierce to the man's psyche, but Shepard knew Alenko well enough to know that he wouldn't fall apart over this. Not now, anyway, and not in public. The biotic was a private man, who had a few close friends and distant acquaintances otherwise. Losing Jenkins like that would be a brutal blow later on, when he had a chance to come to terms with it.

"We have to. The mission is too important, Lieutenant. We can come back for him after we've gotten the beacon off world. You know that." Shepard said, turning away from his fallen comrade. "We can't let his death be for nothing, Alenko."

The biotic was quiet for a long while, and Shepard didn't push him. The two moved on, away from the dead body of Jenkins. Already Normandy's net was aware of the death, and both knew someone would pick him up and give him a proper burial. It didn't help, but they knew it. Shepard shook the thoughts from his head.

Shepard had never known Jenkins personally, not like Alenko had. The cold truth was that, like any other soldier who signed up for ATLAS, Jenkins accepted the risks that came along with the uniform. It seemed like such a waste of talent, losing him like that. Shepard knew it was sloppy of him, and knew that he should have taken point in place of the now deceased private. The entire point of having the boy on this mission was to whet his blade with some ground time, not let him get torn in half by an alien drone squad.

There were still regrets, friend or not, because the boy was still a comrade, but... there was nothing he could do to rectify the situation. Bad luck and bad timing was all it amounted to, and the boy just didn't have enough experience to know better. Now he never would, and there was nothing either of them could do to change that. Regardless, Shepard put it all from his mind. The mission came first and foremost.

But still it was with a silent resolve that the two marines moved on, neither looking back at the dead soldier that was Private Richard L. Jenkins.(2)

000

Ashley Williams was not having a good day.

Feet pounding against the packed earth of Eden Prime, she found herself running as fast as her suit's servos would let her, her breath ragged and tired from sprinting as hard and as fast as she could. In her hands sat her M220 Suppression HMG, drained from the harsh combat that had been eating away at the weapon's impressive munitions well. Behind her scattered gunfire could be heard, most of it from her fellow marines' assault rifles, a lot of it wild, and most of it ineffective.

The munitions they fired were 10mm impact slugs. Designed for maximum penetration and force, they could shred most anything with enough concentration, but were vastly ineffective against these synthetic bastards. Whatever they were, they could take brutal punishment before going down. She'd seen them with sheared off arms and legs, still moving forward, crawling if they had to, gun in hand, firing on them. And those were just the little ones.

She'd run into more than a few of the big ones, carrying some kind of plasma-based rocket launcher that tore through marine armor and melted flesh, and another using an electric flame thrower, the bluish flames cooking men in their suits. She'd watched as the big, walking tank units tore apart Phalanx mechs, ripped up Vindicator tank armor and blasted marines to their component atoms. She'd watched the wasp-like dropships, inhumanly quick and deadly, rip apart dozens of Spitfire VTOLs. She'd watched her ammo counter slowly drop to zero as she tried, desperately, to down as many of the advancing drones as she could, only to find herself empty and cut off from her unit.

She hated herself for running while she could still hear their screams in the background as the synthetics breached their lines again. But she had to run, had to get away. Half a dozen of those damn robots were hot on her heels, hounding her with their inhuman patience and determination. She'd barely managed to get away with them chipping at her shields, slowly eating them down, only to run into more of those drones that those things had left back behind them.

The entire situation was a mess. The invasion had started mere hours ago, yet so fat, communications had been jammed, most of the armor was dead on the field, the spaceport had fallen to that giant ship hovering in the distance and she was totally cut off. Those in the marines had a term for it. FUBAR. It was never more appropriate.

Her gaze dropped to her rear cam, the small screen showing that the Geth weren't far behind, were still shooting at her and even starting to catch up. And yes, she knew what they were. In fact, most of the marines on Eden Prime were aware of just who the invaders were, though almost all comms had been cut after she'd managed to punch out that singular distress call. Something had knocked out all of their long range comms and radar, and killed their linkup with Legacy. It had caused a huge clusterfuck on the ground as everyone was suddenly on their own, aside from whoever was in sight range.

They were almost on top of her.

She reached for her pistol, a backup weapon in every sense of the word, that sat at her waist. Her HMG linked magnetically to her suit, just barely out of the way but where she could get at it if she needed it. She cocked it on the fly, turned, still running, and fired off a volley of three rounds at one of her pursuers. The shells cracked against the Geth's shielding, to no effect. She cursed.

She felt her foot catch on something, a root or a rock or debris. She went down, and she felt her ankle throb at the sudden jerking sensation, and a vicious stinging shot up her leg. She tried to stand, but her twisted ankle stopped her cold. She hobbled a bit, but fell to the ground. Her leg throbbed under the burn of being sprained, and the anesthetic injectors in her suit weren't helping with the pain. It would be a minute before the effects started to kick in, and with the synthetics right behind her, she didn't have that minute.

All she could do was turn, aim, and fire her pistol. She felt the weapon kick in her hands, and watched as the Geth shielding rippled with each deflected slug. She could feel the force of each shot, but the rounds seemed to bounce harmlessly off of the Geth defenses. Still, she kept firing. With each pull of the trigger, she watched her ammo counter drop, and watched the Geth begin to close. She watched them raise their weapons, and try as she might, she found herself frozen in fear. She didn't want to die, not now, not here. She pulled the trigger again, desperately hoping for something, anything. Again, and again, and again.

And then one of the alien's heads exploded backward, the whole, sausage like apparatus coming apart in a fiery explosion of blue and white goo. Ashley stared for a moment, shocked. The Geth seemed to share that expression for all of a second, before they turned and aimed at her as one. That was when she caught a flicker of orange crawl over the chassis of the leftmost synthetic. It promptly turned and opened fire on its companions, all while the two on the right were blown back in a glowing wave of purple biotic force. One of the Geth in the middle died with another head-shattering explosion, seconds before it could even target it's seemingly insane ally.

That was when she turned and saw them. Two men, one carrying a rifle that she'd only heard of in Basic and the other with his arm outstretched, his entire gauntlet glowing with the purple of a biotic amplifier. In a smooth motion, the sniper moved to one of the Geth that had been blasted back, and promptly took its head off at the shoulders while the hacked Geth and its former ally tore each other apart with their energy weapons. The last Geth barely managed to stand before a disc the size of a hockey puck slammed square into its chest, detonating and engulfing the alien in a blossom of crimson fire, blowing it to pieces, literally.

Ashley sat in stunned shock as the two men quickly rushed down to her, weapons raised and bodies tensed, moving swiftly through the foliage. As they approached, she felt her netlink hook up with theirs, and in that instant information on both soldiers flooded into her mind. They were Special Forces, a drop team with field CI protocols. An Infiltrator and a Vanguard, the two moved in perfect unison with each other. It was only seconds before they reached her, the sniper standing watch while the biotic applied a dosage of Medi-Gel to her suit, the chemical seeping in and distributing itself through the armor, healing her damaged leg and stealing away her fatigue.

"Chief Petty Officer Williams?" The biotic, who was identified as Lt. Alenko, asked her. She nodded, as he offered her a hand up. She stood, carefully, still worried about her formerly sprained ankle, and gave a salute to the two men. Alenko nodded to her, but the infiltrator didn't even look back.

"Yes, Lieutenant?" She replied, taking a moment to gauge the slim figure in light drop armor. He seemed pleasant enough, but both of the men were intensely focused on what they were doing.

"I'm Lt. Alenko, and this is Commander Shepard. We just got access to your netlink, and to what you know about these Geth. It's good intel, trooper, and I understand that you're probably exhausted from your ordeal, but..." That was when Shepard interrupted.

"We're going to need you. You're familiar with the terrain and you have working knowledge of the situation. About a quarter klick back, there's a downed heavy with a full munitions pack. Run back and get it, and meet us at the dig site due east. We're going to want you for the push towards the camp. I've already tuned you into our netlink, so you shouldn't have any problems finding us." He said, his voice terse and to the point. Ashley couldn't help but salute and bark out an affirmative. Alenko caught her shoulder before she could leave, however.

"Watch yourself. We took out a number of drones on our way up here, but there may be more back there. If you spot any, turn back and head to the dig site, munitions or no. Clear?" The Lt's words brooked no argument and the Commander nodded his agreement. Ashley nodded an affirmative and began to make her way to the marker they'd given her.

As the heavy left, working her way back to Jenkins' body, Alenko turned to Shepard with a dour look.

"She's been through a lot, CO. If half of her link data is accurate, she watched most of her squad get killed back some three klicks east of here. Apparently those holdout marines weren't able to last. Damn." Alenko sighed tiredly, even as Shepard scanned the horizon once more before the two moved out.

"It's rough, but it can't be helped, Alenko. We have contingencies in place, and I've already forwarded the data to the Spectre. He's been busy as well. Apparently he spotted a jamming device at the dig site, so we're going to want to take that out when we get there. Hopefully the CPO won't take too long to get back, but we need to push on. These things are resilient, so aim for the head or center mass." The Lt. nodded as the two cut through the brush. Their wireframe scanners had already picked up multiple hostiles ahead, and given the narrow corridor that the two would have to traverse to get to the dig site, they needed to be careful.

The first Geth didn't even see the Commander when he put a sabot clean through its lamp-like face, whatever serving as its brain splattering out over its partner, who found itself slammed against the wall and torn apart by light assault rifle fire. Four more Geth rushed out, but one had the familiar orange sheen of an AI hack almost as soon as it moved from cover and opened fire on its allies. The ensuing chaos worked well in the Commander's favor as he picked off the confused Geth while Alenko hammered them with a Warp that ate away their shielding and armor.

Scattered and unstable, the two Geth that managed to get behind cover didn't see the puck-like proximity grenade sail over their cover until its detonator beeped. The two barely had time to look down as the ensuing blast severed one cleanly in half and ripped off the limbs of the other. Alenko quickly finished them off as the Commander made his way down the corridor of dirt and stone. Eight more Geth slid from cover and opened fire on the two as they hit the edge of the narrow valley, even as four more of the lethal drones flew in from above, flicking shreds of blue plasma at the pinned specialists.

Alenko threw out another biotic wave, the bolt rolling over one of the entrenched aliens and the Commander slotted in an overcharge slug, his weapon beginning to hum and glow with power. He leaned out and pulled the trigger, a high-power iridium sabot flying out and literally blowing one of the Geth to pieces. The drones circled, and the two were forced back as the bots tried to flank them. Bolts of plasma pinged their shields, quickly causing them to drop. Alenko let off a burst from his M98, catching one drone, but the shots were drowned out as the braying of an HMG ripped through the field. All three remaining drones were ripped apart as CPO Williams made it over the ridge, her M220 kicking as it let loose a burst of superheated 10mm penetration rounds.

Shepard spun in unison with the attack, his rifle tucked into his shoulder, kicking with the force of a mule as he sent another round through the faceplate of a Geth trooper. The remaining few fell back as Alenko and Shepard pushed up under the cover of Williams' suppression fire. Several of the Geth turned and opened fire, their energy leaving glowing pockmarks across the field. One simply collapsed in on itself, crushed under Alenko's Singularity while another was caught in the deadly crossfire between Ashley and Shepard. Between the three, none of the alien aggressors survived, most wiped out under the deadly volley of the M220.

Quickly, the three moved into the small excavation. They couldn't see any other hostiles, with nothing pinging off of their combat scanners. Weapons raised they moved towards the center, a large pedestal structure tucked halfway into the rocky walls, but still looking as if it were newly built. It was there that they found the scrambler that Nihilus had told them about. It was a simple pylon, standing nearly ten feet in height, humming away at the center of the ruin, its tip glowing an ethereal blue.

Shepard dropped to one knee, his omni-tool lighting up. Opening the base plate of the machine, the tool's mass fields easily pried open the thin covering, revealing a mass of wires within. Ashley watched him, quietly, her own netlink scanning the area around her as she checked the bodies around the dig site, Alenko standing watch closer to the ramp that lead up to the research base where Ashley's unit had made their stand. Nothing was pinging over the network, though the sat-com and scanner network were both blocked out by the scrambler's effects.

That was part of the reason her unit was caught like they were. They had been breaking back to the spaceport, trying to regroup when they were hit from behind. They ended up forced back to the research base, which was already getting pounded from the dig site by an unending wave of Geth. Already they'd received a few scattered reports of attacks across the rural district of the colony, a solid feint, as the bulk of the ATLAS garrison was sent out to investigate and repel the invaders. They were hours away, and once the Geth shock troops overwhelmed the token watch force left behind, they set up that damn scrambler and cut them off from reinforcements and artillery. Coupled with that, a well placed gravity bomb had ripped up the hover servos of the few Vindicator tanks that had been left behind, and while heavily armored, they didn't stand a chance against the mobile Geth armor units and were quickly destroyed.

The marines had held as steadfastly as they could, backed by a not insignificant support force of Phalanx combat mechs, but they were scattered already from the strong initial assault and even more so once the dropships started reinforcing the shock troops with regulars. Once that happened, the Geth just isolated and picked off whatever squads remained, and while hers was one of the larger forces, they were hurting bad on ammo and Medi-Gel. All it took was a concentrated strike from both ends to overwhelm the few choke point defenses they had put together and burst into the main body of the camp. That was when Ashley ran, making a break for a gap in the Geth lines and escaping into the dig site. From there she met Shepard, and the rest was history.

She turned to look at the man in the tight, dark Infiltrator armor, his massive rifle resting weightlessly across his back as he worked his omni-tool with surgical precision, shearing away chunks of covering and pulling out several wires. She wasn't sure what he was doing, not really. If it were her, she'd just tear out anything important looking and blast the rest, but he seemed to move with purpose, his fingers stripping wires and his tool soldering them together. It took moments, and he pulled a grenade from his launcher, slipping in something that made her radiation counter spike and soldering it into the wiring he'd pulled out, before resealing the scrambler and seamlessly replacing the removed plates.

With a few touches to the tool's interface, her combat scanner lit up like a Christmas tree, dozens of red dots flashing over the three kilometers between where they'd picker her up and the spaceport, and while there were a few pockets of green dots, they were quickly blinking out. Shepard stood, and Alenko ran up to him. The two seemed to share something, but she didn't know what. After a moment, Shepard looked to her, and his voice crackled over her comm.

"Williams, Alenko's spotted something in the distance, but the sat-com isn't showing it clearly. We aren't sure what we're running into, but we think maybe you've seen these before." In that instant pictures of strange, spike-like constructs flashed over her HUD. Her eyes followed the spikes, which rose high into the air, to... something... sitting at the tops. The picture was grainy, though, partially from interference, and partially from something that huge ship by the spaceport was generating. She zoomed in some, twisted the image, before letting out a quiet, horrified gasp. They were bodies, strung up onto the spikes, like macabre alters. Most were unmoving, but she could see some still twitching, still alive. And she recognized where those images were taken. They were taken at the research post, where she had barely managed to evade the Geth earlier.

"I... I don't know, Commander, but... I think some of them are still alive." She whispered into her comm unit, and Shepard shared a look with Alenko. The former walked up to her and laid a hand on her shoulder. Shepard looked to Alenko and nodded. Neither seemed particularly surprised by the revelation, or moved by it. They were cold to it, and that bothered Ashley more than a bit. She thought she was going to be sick. Bile built in her throat, and she took a deep, shaky breath.

"Williams, look at me." The command was unquestioned. Her helm looked up to meet his, to look into his glowing amber eyes. "We need to push on, and we need to be able to count on you. I know this is hard, but if we don't get moving, their lives will have been lost for nothing. The Geth are after the beacon, and every second you doubt yourself, it's one more second they have to get it off world." Her combat scanner beeped. She glanced at it and saw over a dozen red blips moving to where the three had just come from. They were headed to the scrambler.

"I'll be okay, Commander. Don't... don't worry, I won't slow you down." She said, and Shepard nodded. Within minutes, they had cleared he dig site, and started making their way up to the research station, just as the red blips made it to the previously abandoned location. They converged on the scrambler, and Shepard paused and looked back. With a single hand motion, Alenko dropped to his knees and Ashley followed suit. Shepard held up three fingers, and then counted down. As soon as he hit zero, a blast shook the three, a small mushroom cloud rising in the distance. All of the enemy signals had vanished, killed in the blast, and Ashley finally realized just what the infiltrator had done. He made the scanner into a makeshift bomb, using a grenade and some polonium and a few minutes with a soldering laser.

Alenko grabbed her arm, shaking her from her dazed thoughts. He motioned for them to continue, and she saw that Shepard had already started moving forward. The tips of those strange spikes could already be seen from over the rocky hills, and at the rate they were going, they'd reach the base soon. They didn't encounter any other Geth units on the way, partially thanks to the now-active sat-com directing them through the worst ambushes and partially from the fact that the Commander sniped any straggling enemies that were still standing long before they even pinged her combat scanner.

It was a testament to his skill with that rifle.

Alenko lagged behind, covering their rear with a combination of biotics and some light support fire, knocking out a few drones that had tried to flank them quickly and quietly. Between the two, Ashley tried to keep her eyes open and watch their sides, but with most of the foliage cut back and the natural incline opening up, there wasn't much for her to do besides observe. Shepard was pausing and pushing, letting them catch up as he traded information between them, marking out waypoints and pitfalls throughout the map while they moved to stay close by. A few times Ashley worried that he would get too far ahead, or fall into an ambush or trap or something, but he didn't, and she knew it was silly of her to even consider it. Infiltrators were the Imperial Elite. They didn't make mistakes, not ones who've seen as much action as the Commander had.

"Heads up, we have green contacts on the move at point four. They just appeared on top of the waypoint, and I didn't receive an all-comms back when I sent one out. The Geth may have found a way to fool the FoF scanners, so stay sharp and watch our flank, but double time it up here." Shepard's voice cut through the quiet and the two troopers burst into action. Quickly, they scaled the incline, ignoring the sizable number of bodies that piled up along the edges of the road, cut up by energy fire and shoved off to the sides. Ashley had to fight to keep from stopping to look at the data overlays on the dead soldiers, but still ended up catching the nameplates of friends and squad mates.

The two quickly reached Shepard, who was on his belly, rifle scanning the research station some five hundred meters ahead. Alenko dropped down beside him, and Williams dropped to one knee a short ways down the ramp.

"I'm not seeing anything Commander." Alenko whispered through their comm units. His voice was tense, and his hands gripped his rifle tightly. Ashley didn't blame him for his tension. The entire situation felt wrong. The number of contacts was increasing, but her netlink didn't show anything on the screen. Green dots, reminiscent of allies, spawned all over the research area, but all they saw were more of those damn spikes.

"Me either, sir. Do you want us to move up and assess?" Williams asked quietly, her own hands wrapping against the duel handles of her M220. A moment of silence passed, before the Commander nodded and confirmed the order. Alenko stood, followed by Ashley, both with weapons at the ready. They moved slowly, one meter at a time, watching for anything that might tip them off. The sat-com was empty, though, and their scanners didn't ping any hostiles, just a lot of what appeared to be healthy marines.

Something didn't feel right, and it sat in Ashley's gut like a stone. They reached the dig site with no trouble, for all of their caution. Nothing pinged their scanners, nothing moved at all, no enemies, no marines, nothing. A dead Phalanx sat at the edge of the post, armor crushed and leaking blood, but otherwise unmoving. Another sat not too far from that, sheared to pieces from heavy rocket fire. There were a lot of those spikes here, more than a dozen, more than twice that. All dripping blood like a twisted rain as the occupants hung speared fifteen feet in the air, the gleaming steel points streaked with countless fluids, some darker than others, some bodies still twitching, but most dead. She could barely stand to look up at them.

It all reminded Ashley of something she'd seen back in her high school days. An image in a book that she had read for a report. A book about a mad lord who would spear people up on pikes to rot at the edges of his fiefdom, as a warning and a message to his enemies. She remembered the image, a painting of old, but one that had left her with nightmares for days afterwords. A picture of a thousand bodies, all spiked through and hanging in midair, and a smiling man dining at a table, eating his dinner. Titled "Amidst the Silent Forest", the image haunted her dreams for some time. Like then, she had a feeling that she would be seeing this again, in her nightmares. She couldn't help but shudder.

"Heads up! Watch yourself, Williams, something's happening!" Alenko's voice tore through her comms, waking her from her daze. She checked her scanner and found nothing, checked her HUD and her sat-com uplink, but nothing had changed. She shot a glance at the Lieutenant, and he pointed to the impaling spikes. The movement was so subtle she had missed it, but the spikes were retracting, collapsing down seamlessly, and bringing their dead-but-twitching cargo with them.

_~End Chapter One: Part One~_

* * *

(1) Hey, if Bioware can stick in a plug of their fake but otherwise well received deity, so can I. Besides, with a setup like this, how could I resist?

(2) This always kinda felt like a plug for the infamous WoW meme. So as the saying goes, why the hell not?

**Authors Notes:**Alright, ladies and gents, here you are, a few days ahead of schedule even. This chapter was already finished, much like it's predecessor as well as having part two done as well, though that I'll be posting separate (this chapter turned into a 40 page monster by the time I finished it. Yikes.) from this one in a couple of days. They all needed some heavy post-edit revision once I actually took a look at them again, which was part of the reason it took so long for me to get this cleaned and ready to go.

Honestly, I wasn't entirely sure about the quality. I genuinely am worried that it comes off as too campy compared to the rest of my writing, because I spent most of my time imagining a long running action sequence, which I'll be the first to admit isn't a strong point of mine, and not quite so much on character interaction. I've been told that it's a bit weak, and looking back, it kind of is, in that department, but this wasn't really the point of the chapter. I liked the Eden Prime sequence, and I wanted to keep it in even though this is AU and looking at it from a plot perspective might seem lazy of me, but this is fanfiction. If I wanted to do something original I would have, hehe.

But in all seriousness, I was very back and forth on whether I wanted to post this now or to go back to it for a couple more days and make sure, but I figured you've all put up with a shitty prologue long enough that you need something with meat to go along with the salad, so here you are.

Coming along with this chapter, I did make a number of interestingly divergent choices with certain facets of the story. I'm sure you noticed the little things like tanks, mechs, the use of chemical slug throwers in place of mass effect weapons, and so on. All of these decisions were put together early on in my development notes on the Empire, a lot of which will make themselves known through the use of Codex entries (Yes, I know, I know, I said I wouldn't use them. So, well, I lied.) that will cover a lot of the minute detail work that won't be included in the bulk story. I'm hoping that using them will enable me to skip over some of the smaller detail work and focus in on the main plot while maintaining quality and maybe giving you guys something fun to talk about while I toil away behind a keyboard.

I will say this about my writing style; I am slow. I like to put something together and then revise the hell out of it, cleaning up plotholes and smoothing over rough edges as I see them, and then sending them off for edits, and then doing post edit revisions as well. The process can take up to a month, I hate to say it, and sometimes longer. It all depends on whether I produce absolute shit or not, hehe. Progress on chapter two is going well, I will say, being at around ten pages at this posting and growing slowly, but from what I'm looking at, this is going to be another major chunk of change even after I clean it up. But hey, slow and clean is better than rushed and kinda crappy (depending on your perspective of this chapter) so we'll see.

Anyway, the piece I used to inspire the Imperial marine armor is actually the Marine Armour Concepts piece by Ben Wootten. It really was an amazing piece and absolutely brilliant in it's design. I loved it.

Anyway, since your probably tired of listening to me ramble on, I bid you farewell and safe travels, and I'll see you on the other side.

* * *

**Codex:** The Rosenkov-Ariake Mark 37 Tactical Crisis Suit

As the dangers of an ever growing galaxy become increasingly so, ATLAS has found itself needing better, stronger, more durable and effective equipment to both combat threats and keep it's men and women safe from the hazards they face. It was with this fact in mind that the Empire established the Rosenkov-Ariake Institute of Military Technology, which consisted of two former mega-conglomerate competitors that serviced the majority of the factions during the Last Great War, which had been seized by Imperial asset allocators some time after the establishment of the Imperial Throne. Their task was to provide the Imperial military with better weapons, stronger armor, and more advanced field technology, as well as mobile weapons combat platforms and atmospheric craft. They were also tasked with maintenance and development of newer and better field gear as time progresses, in order to maintain a competitive military edge throughout established space.

The Crisis-class powered armor suit that many Imperial citizens relate to the image of the ATLAS corps is one of the Institute's crowning achievements. Based off of older field operations designs put forth in the early twenty-first century, the Crisis suit utilizes a number of time tested technologies as well as instituting a number of post-Contact designs taken from the very best of both the Citadel and the Terminus armor manufacturers. From the top down, the Crisis suit sports a full body carbon nanoweave construction over hardened titanium-based ceramic plating, which offers a mix of both impact and piercing protection that covers all vital areas, including the chest, back, shoulders, upper and lower arms and legs, as well as both hands, feet, elbows and knees. Rubberized self-sealing nano-fiberweave lining covers all joints and the neck, creating an internal environment equal to Earth's atmosphere and pressure level, and is rated to deflect or absorb over three thousand PSI of impact pressure, tripling that at the armor's hard points. The helmet, modeled after older gas-mask designs, sports a full three hundred and sixty degree covering that encompasses the full back and forehead of the soldier, as well as a seamlessly integrated faceplate that provides oxygen recirculation, field information, radar and communications. Older models of the helmet sport simple diamond-hard crystallized lenses, but the latest designs have incorporated a series of micro cameras in their place, allowing for an internal one hundred and eighty degree view forwards, which can be zoomed in upon or switched between infra-red, electronic or low light vision settings. A series of networked cameras also provide the soldier with rear and side view imaging complete with all the aforementioned vision settings.

Each suit comprises of an undercarriage endoskeleton that has a full system of robotically enhanced muscles and joints, as well as dozens of magnetic bolt links. They system allows for a variable exoskeleton, which can be switched between a number of standardized designs depending on the soldier's needs. The exoskeletal armor also has a number of magnetic bolt links for the application of field kit and specialized gear, including a sat-com uplink, munitions kit, medical kit, heavy arms kit and recon kit, as well as biotic amplifiers and omni-tool tech boosters. Medi-gel and stimulant dispensers come standard with each endoskeleton, with additional dispensers available as exoskeletal upgrades, as well as grenade kits and tertiary munitions packs.

The most common of these kits is the Heavy- and Specialist-class suits, the former made of significantly bulkier plates designed to take significantly more damage, as well as a mask collar made of the same nanoweave-over-titanium plating. The arm and leg coverings have been expanded to wrap around exposed joints, with the knee and elbow pads sporting significantly increased thickness for added fire protection. The Heavy configuration sports an integrated recoil compensation system designed for use in conjunction with a number of high-power squad-based heavy weapons, as well as sporting a back-mounted munitions pack. Coupled with this, the Heavy-class Crisis suit has hardened kinetic barriers, designed to take up to three times as much punishment as standard kinetic defenses. Beyond that, it also sports a series of micro-boosters for assisted jumping, running or landing, in order to compensate for the increased weight.

The Specialist-class Crisis suit utilizes significantly lessened armor, designed for more lightweight maneuvers and greater flexibility, if at the cost of armor protection. The unit has highly advanced kinetic barriers, triple layered using the same hardening technology as the Heavy model, more potent but at the cost of staying power. This makes the Specialist armor somewhat fragile, and because of this fact, it's not often seen in front line operations. By design, it was intended for use by commandos and infiltrators, sporting a much increased radar and scanner suite, as well as being made out of non-reactive "stealth" materials that block out traditional forms of scanner tracking. Combined with this, the Specialist suit has a much more advanced technical AI that comes standard with the unit, designed to increase the tech efficiency of the operator by greatly enhancing "hard-light" omni-tool weapons like the Cryo- and Incineration-blast programs. It also drops the "cool down" caused by brute-force hacking programs, lowering the time it takes for the hack to bypass the new firewall network the target uses to throw off the forced access. This model also has a series of high-power internal boosters, intended for use in naturally or artificially uneven terrain, which greatly increases both vertical and horizontal jump distance, useful when having to reposition in the field, and with the advent of Tactical Cloaking technology, makes the Specialist suit an invaluable tool for all field technicians alike.

The latest model is the [DATA CENSORED], used by the [DATA CENSORED], this armor [DATA CENSORED] in it's [DATA CENSORED]. Combining the latest in [DATA CENSORED] technology, it [DATA CENSORED] and has been shown to [DATA CENSORED]. Utilizing [DATA CENSORED] it is able to [DATA CENSORED] in which [DATA CENSORED]. The [DATA CENSORED] is considered one of the [DATA CENSORED] with an emphasis on [DATA CENSORED]. This [DATA CENSORED] allows the armor to [DATA CENSORED], and makes it compatible with [DATA CENSORED] as well as [DATA CENSORED]. This makes it one of the [DATA CENSORED] with an impressive [DATA CENSORED].


	3. Come and Gone

As promised, here's Chapter One part Two! Elation for those of you who care!

000

"What... what the hell!" The words escaped her lips as the macabre scene played out, the bodies, bulging and warped, lining with blue wires that seemed to grow on them like moss, with ashen skin and glowing azure eyes, slammed into the bases of their spikes with bone-jarring force. Electricity crackled over them, and to Ashley's horror, they began to twitch. Slowly, like puppets with their strings cut, they began to rise, limbs hanging limply, jaws slack

Like zombies, they stood as one, staring into nothingness, perfectly still. One let out a moan. All their heads turned as one, and stared straight at the two soldiers between them. In that instant Ashley and Kaiden turned and ran, heading straight towards the entrance of the site. Heads exploded outwards as the quick thunder of Shepard's rifle picked off the ghouls as they began to run at the two, giving chase, slowly building momentum as they emitted their constant, low groan. Ashley didn't even bother looking back, and instead just fired her M220 from over her shoulder, letting the servos in her suit do the aiming as she ran. Alenko, for his part, let off a biotic wave strong enough to rip the legs clean off of two of them. It didn't stop them, but they were much slower dragging themselves across the ground.

All the while the Commander didn't stop firing. Each round slammed home, aided by years of harsh practice and skill, each shot causing a head to explode, a body to blast out, a leg to be sheared clean off. He empties the remains of his clip, and slammed another clean in, cocking the railgun in one smooth motion before firing off another round. More bodies fell, but even then he could see that more were pouring in from deeper in the research post. Ashley dived over one of the makeshift barricades and brought her weapon to bear, the braying of her M220 shredding anything that came close to her and Alenko threw out wave after wave of biotic power, tossing the zombies back in fives and sixes. It wasn't enough. In that instant, he opened his CI interface and sent a call to the Normandy. Nothing special, no words were exchanged as he sent an urgent fire support request to the ship's AI. Using the overhead sat-com, he locked in on the four largest clusters of the mutated monsters, and sent the order.

Shepard slotted another grenade into his launcher, one armed with flash incendiaries, and let it fly. Like a frisbee, the proximity sensor closed on the creatures, and in an instant the middle of the pack burst into light and fire, the superheated gels in the grenade melting the flesh from them in seconds. Minutes passed while the three cut down the seemingly unending horde of glowing corpses, and Shepard could only frown at what he saw. Down to his last clip on the rifle, he had pushed up to where Ashley and Kaiden were holding the line. Both were emptying their weapons at the same alarming rate that he was. He could feel his rifle beginning to overheat, the barrel glowing red under the force of the electromagnetic rails that flung sabot after sabot at the encroaching enemies.

He glanced at his sat-com, at the overhead images of the slathering horde. More were pouring in from the spaceport, and at this rate the three would be overwhelmed shortly. He watched the timer sent by Normandy's AI as the ship sped to their position. It had needed several minutes to get there, mark its targets and calibrate its weapons enough to not turn the next ten square klicks into molten glass. The three held, even as Shepard switched to his sidearm, his rifle overheated from the strain. Alenko was looking ragged, barely standing as he tossed ever-weakening biotic strikes mixed with intermittent gunfire and Williams had started pounding on her M220, trying to clear a jam from the cherry-red weapon.

He looked back at the zombies, his pistol kicking in his hands, each round tearing through the creatures and splattering the blue pus they seemed to use for blood over the bodies of their cohorts, but to little effect. Ignorant of their injuries, they didn't stop, didn't pause.

And then they vanished under the incandescent glow of orbital fire. Shepard barely ducked behind the makeshift cover the three had been using as a hard point, yanking down Ashley with him and Kaiden, who had been on the same frequency, used that second to collapse behind his cover. The ground shuddered, and waves of heat and light poured over them. His sat-com read four direct hits, four precision bursts of heavy anti-ship missile fire that left nothing living in its wake. In that instant, most of the undead creatures simply ceased to be, the rest reduced to skeletons from a heat wave nearly as hot as the surface of the local star.

The three sat in silence, letting the ringing in their ears and the flashy afterimages in their eyes fade away. Shepard could faintly hear Nihilus coming over his comm, asking what had happened and if he was needed. The Commander blocked his voice for a moment, before grunting a negative and standing, slowly. With a glance, he saw that both Ashley and the Lieutenant seemed to have weathered the strike as well as he had, if not better. The biotic was somewhat ragged, and Shepard let him sit and catch his breath while the heavy cleared her weapon of its jam. His rifle had cooled by then, thanks to the number of heat sinks it had inside of it, but down to half of one clip and some floating iridium rounds he kept in his side pack were far from an ideal situation.

"Commander? Commander, this is Normandy, do you copy?" Joker's voice crackled over Shepard's comm. Shepard, for his part, sent back a data packet to the Normandy while he recovered from being at near ground zero. He saw Kaiden relax and once she had cleared the Jam, Ashley had taken it upon herself to police up some of the bodies that lined the natural incline behind them. That last fight couldn't have been good for her reserves.

"This is Shepard, Normandy, we read. Good shot, Joker." He said as he gazed across the fire zone. It would still be a few minutes before it was cool enough to walk through without damaging their armor, and Shepard was more than happy to use that time to rest.

"Always a pleasure, sir." The pilot chuckled back, "We cleared out the bulk of the infestation around you, from what I'm seeing. Scans are showing the enemy pulling back to the spaceport after that last showing, and from what we can tell, there aren't many left."

"Good to hear, Joker. What's the situation looking like out there?"

"Not too bad, Commander. Seems like the E-corps finally got some Vindicators up and running, and we shot down most of the dropships that are in the area. We're pushing them back, but some of the hard points were reporting those zombie things that you just encountered. Not nearly so many, but enough to cause problems. We're going to be heading back to the hot zone shortly, but we're glad we could help." Joker said, his tone still cocky, but reserved enough given the situation.

"Me too, Normandy. Shepard out." The Commander turned back to the fire zone, rifle in hand. He saw Williams had already started scanning the area once he and Kaiden joined her. The three were silent. There wasn't much to say, he supposed, given what they'd seen. The Geth had used those spikes to turn marines into monsters, plain and simple. What was more disturbing, though, was that apparently, they didn't use dead marines, if given the number of corpses they'd passed so far, which implied that they had to be alive when they were spiked. It was a grim line of thought. The entire situation was a mess, and now this on top of every thing else.

Shepard knew that it probably wouldn't be the last time he saw something like that either. He shut his eyes and shook his head before letting his suit inject him with an adrenalizer. He needed energy and focus, and the fight was wearing on him harder than he thought it would. It was all insane, with the Geth and that bizarre ship sitting in low orbit and now zombies of all things? Even Elysium seemed like a pleasent memory compared to this... this perversion, and that sat in his stomach like a rock. Regardless, he didn't let it show. He was Commander Shepard, and he had an operation to complete, but even his logic tasted like ash in his mouth.

"Come on, we have to get going." Was all he said, sending Nihilus an updated information packet on what he'd seen. The Turian sent back more Intel on what was ahead, with an apology for missing the obvious ambush. It wasn't his fault, both knew, given that he doubted anyone had seen such twisted technology, even a Council Spectre, besides the Geth ever since they pushed the Quarians out of their system.

Both Kaiden and Ashley fell into step behind him, their boots crunching over the cooling glass that marked the orbital strike site. Most of the prefab structures that sat at the research base had been blown to pieces from the shockwave, but a few remained, and Shepard made a note to investigate them before he left. With any luck one might have a munitions locker or be an armory for the local ATLAS detachment. Shepard snorted at that. He could hope.

Moving though the dead outpost, the three kept a vigilant watch on their combat scanners. Every so often they would ping something or other, sometimes local fauna, sometimes the upper half of one of the zombies that had managed to survive the bombardment, but no Geth, and no marines. Shepard knew that last fact sat on Williams, and she had performed admirably thus far, but he didn't know how long she could hold it together. Both he and Kaiden had Special Forces training, psyche tricks taught into them to keep themselves from breaking down over the horrors they saw in combat. Williams was a marine, and while they were a tough lot, she was still young, in her early twenties at best and he didn't doubt that this was her first real taste of war.

Shepard was torn from his thoughts with the pinging of his combat scanner. Two more friendlies had popped up, apparently trapped in one of the prefabs that survived the bombardment. It was luck if the two were alive after that, dumb luck if they survived the initial attack and bad luck if they were zombies that got tossed into the shelter somehow earlier. Either way, the three moved up to the shelter, and Shepard used his omni-tool to fry the locking mechanism. The door slid open and Alenko rushed in low, weapon at the ready, followed by Ashley on high. The two inside the shelter screamed and ducked.

Apparently they were survivors. Dumb luck indeed.

The two soldiers lowered their weapons and Shepard walked in, eyeing the two researchers with wary relief. The two, an older man and a middle-aged woman, both human, looked infinitely relieved.

"Oh thank Legacy you're here!"(1) Gushed one, the woman, who sagged with relief as tension left her body. She was one of the research staff that had been ushered into a prefab when the first wave of the Geth hit, and had watched through the metal slats as the marine defenders were overwhelmed. She had been on the ground since the first shots had been fired, and had been observing the site from the beginning. Her name was Dr. Warren, one of the head researchers at the dig site and in charge of the beacon's transport, which made her more than invaluable. The partner, another researcher who was named Dr. Manuel, was also a survivor but... apparently the man had become unstable after witnessing the events of the day. He was ranting psychotically and had forced Shepard to knock him out. Sloppy, yes, but quick and effective.

He uploaded all of Warren's data to his netlink and sent off the data packet to the Normandy. Perhaps it would prove useful in the future. The doctor herself had opted to stay behind in the shed and lock the door behind her. Hopefully it would keep her safe until Imperial reinforcements arrived, which, according to Normandy, should be within the next hour or two. She had also given him Manuel's data, which, while not as detailed as Warren's, was still useful. Between the two, Shepard had managed to get a relatively firm grasp of the situation ahead. It wasn't pretty.

Early on in the attack, the bulk of the remaining marine forces on the ground had congregated at the spaceport, but were attacked before they could set up any solid defenses, and were torn apart once the Geth managed to start getting troops on the ground in bulk. The fighting had been heavy, and more than a few marines were killed, with even more getting captured and impaled. The few that had escaped tried to set up a defensive hard point at the research post, but that quickly proved to be untenable when the Geth came at them and caught them in a crossfire. Pinned between the two, low on ammo and medical supplies, it was only a matter of time before it all fell apart. Things got ugly after that, and Warren had seen it all, including the impalement of anyone the Geth could capture, which confirmed Shepard's suspicions.

What they saw was... disturbing, to say the least. The Geth had apparently studied Imperial tactics prior to coming to Eden Prime. They'd managed to intercept and disperse any kind of regulated response to their attacks while using those jammers to block long range communications. They had consistently managed to rout the local marine retinue

The three left the two doctors in their prefab, heading down the road that lead to the spaceport. It wasn't a long walk, maybe a klick from one location to the other. Shepard was grateful for that, at least. They needed a break in the action, if only to catch their breath. In that moment a gunshot rang out, clear and loud over the mostly empty plain that sat between the research post and the spaceport downhill. Alenko shared a look with Williams as they followed Shepard over the ridge, the latter constantly scanning the horizon while Alenko brought up the rear once more. The three hurried. One gunshot was never a good sign, but it was something.

They encountered a token defense force, which, while speeding their way, worried Shepard more than a bit. It either meant that they were running out of soldiers or that they had almost removed the beacon, only one of which was even remotely likely. Shepard gripped his rifle tightly, his eyes drifting to the massive ship that sat near to the spaceport, uncomfortably so. If it was still in orbit, there was a chance that the beacon was still on Eden Prime, but only barely.

"Nihilus, do you read?" The Commander queried, his comm directing the transmission to the Spectre. As he did so, he motioned for Alenko to take point and the three hurried their way towards the dock. A moment of silence passed, and another. Shepard felt his stomach fall. He tried again, sending the message on a broader band, in case the Turian had switched spectrums. Again, nothing. Something was wrong. Even if the transmissions were being jammed, Nihilus should have been able to respond, given that they were routed through the Normandy and not on the local network.

"Something wrong Commander?" asked Williams while she checked her weapon, her gaze shifting between it and him.

"The Spectre isn't responding on comms, and his IFF signature just stopped moving. Not an inch in the last four minutes." John sighed, "I have to assume he's been neutralized. His last position was ahead, at the spaceport, and I'm marking it as waypoint delta-four."

"What do you think happened to him, Commander?" Alenko asked, but Shepard only shrugged.

"I can't say. He hasn't moved and isn't responding to my hails, so he's either dead or incapacitated. We'll move up slow. Watch your cardinals and keep your head down. There's a chance this is a trap, so stay frosty and if you see something suspicious, tap your comms twice." John checked his weapon and ran a general scan on the area, but his wireframe came up dry. Ashley took point, followed by Alenko and Shepard, her weapon flush against her shoulder. There was an air of tension between the three as they trekked low across the open field. The brush was charred back and pockmarked around them, and a number of the buildings around them, mostly sheds and prefabs were shot up or blasted apart. Lots of weapons fire, but sporadic, wild. Panicked. The stench of rotting meat was in the air, like a slaughterhouse that had been abandoned mid-workday. John gave the battlefield a sidelong glance. It wasn't hard to guess what happened to anyone who thought to hide out in those structures.

He'd seen this sort of thing before, back on Elysium some years back. Marines were trained in basic trigger discipline, amongst other things, but not civilians. They had a tendency to spray and pray, especially when they're fleeing from something and flocking to whatever they thought could provide cover. Places like those sheds they'd passed. Little more than sheet-metal constructs, they provided no barrier to high speed munitions, Imperial, Citadel or otherwise. Prefabs weren't rated to stop any kind of standard small arms munitions either, but it wasn't exactly common knowledge. John sighed. And because of that, the civvies panicked, fled to what they thought would be a good place to hold up in, and were then promptly cut apart as Geth weapons punched through the walls.

It was worse when they reached the spaceport. Moving up the access ramp, they came across several dozen more of those Geth impalement devices, all of them packed to the edges of the platform, the ground below coated in a number of sickly browns and yellows. It was a macabre painting made from blood and worse, covering the floor, the walls, the machines themselves. Shattered armor lay around the platform, broken weapons, shredded clothing, and dead bodies piled high, tossed off the far edge and yet in such numbers that they still reached past the lip from two meters down. Dock workers, farmers, excavators, marines, anyone who fought or tried to resist, it looked like. The doors to the warehouse hung open, apparently used by the Geth to house anyone who captured them, dragging them out one by one, turning them into those... things.

It was sickening. They found much of the same on the next platform as well; any cargo that could have been moved was piled haphazardly off to the side to make room for the spikes, many many more, though it looked like they hadn't been used yet. Shepard stared at them, his eyes cold and hard. It was a small mercy that those who were executed were left to rot instead of being turned into those... husks.

John shook his head, his hands tightening against the grips of his rifle. He was supposed to prevent this kind of thing, supposed to stop it. He was the one who suffered the horrors, so people could live free and ignorant of how terrible this universe was. He had failed them in that regard and it weighed on him. This was too much. Just simply too much to bear all at once. He shut his eyes to it, focused away from it, letting his work distract him from the stench of rot and human feces that floated on the wind. He didn't look at Ashley or Kaiden, didn't do anything but put one foot before the other, pulling himself away from the scene. The others were silent as they followed him past the rest of the Geth machines, no less eager to move away from the worst of it.

The three pushed on, deeper into the port, slower, more cautious. Shepard couldn't know what Williams or Alenko were thinking, but he knew it couldn't be any better than what was going through his mind. The entire situation was FUBAR and getting worse by the second. The only thing he was thankful for was that it appeared as though the Geth had sent all of those husks at them when they were at the research station. It was a small mercy for that tactical failure. Had they been forced to fight the zombies on more open ground, like the spaceport, they would have been overwhelmed. Only the winding pathways between the spaceport proper and the research station, and the station and the dig site had funneled them enough to be controlled.

"Commander!" Ashley's voice tore him from his thoughts, something that Shepard berated himself for, silently. He needed to focus on the matter at hand. This was a tragedy, but he'd seen horror before. This... this was nothing new. It was that thought that he used to crush out the few flitting sympathies he'd felt for the turned. They were gone, and there wasn't time to think about it anymore.

"What is it, Williams?" Shepard asked, his tone cooler than it had been, but just barely. He walked over to the CPO, and kneeled beside her. His eyes narrowed at what he saw.

Nihilus. Dead.

A neat, round hole in the back of his head, his face torn clean off by the exit wound, through and through with full penetration? Nihilus wouldn't have even felt it... Looked to be a high power slug, but without the traditional scarring of an Imperial weapon or the burns of a Geth weapon, but he couldn't tell from this vantage point.

"Damn. The Council isn't going to be happy about this." Alenko commented from the side, ignoring the look Shepard shot him. He was right, though. The death of the Spectre was going to stir up a political shitstorm with the Council, especially given their mission and just who he was. He didn't even look like he saw it coming, either, so there was either a sniper out there somewhere, or someone caught him off guard. Either thought was adequately disturbing.

"It doesn't matter what they think right now. Nihilus was a professional, one of the best, and whatever caught him took him completely off guard. Didn't even have a weapon drawn, from the looks of it. I'm thinking sniper." Shepard said after a moment, standing. They were close to the tramway that linked the primary station with this secondary, and if Warren's data was correct, that was where the beacon would have been taken.

Damnit. Shepard had assumed the worst when he lost contact with Nihilus, but he'd been hoping to find the Turian incapacitated, or to not find the man at all. There was no denying just what he was looking at here. Political shitstorm didn't even begin to cover it. The entire mission had gone balls up from the second they landed, between the beacon, the husks, the Geth and now this, John couldn't help but feel a very uncomfortable rock form in his gut. The Council was going to be breathing blood and fire over this unless they retrieved the beacon after everything else was said and done.

"I'm not so sure, sir. If it was, why not have them waiting for us here? Why pull them back? It's only been about ten minutes since we heard the shot that I assume took down the Spectre. Surely then knew we were coming." Alenko said as an aside. It was sound logic, but something that Shepard had already thought of. The entire situation bothered him more than a bit, because it looked like the Spectre had been shot up close, as opposed to being at range, and that had nasty implications all it's own.

"Regardless, we need to get moving. As long as that ship is sitting out there, there's a chance they haven't managed to get the beacon off world. Losing the Turian will be the least of our issues if they get that artifact off of Eden Prime. Move up, but keep your eyes peeled and your weapons hot. We may have a sniper out there, so stay sharp." The Commander cocked his weapon and began moving deeper into the complex, his orders brooking no argument. Alenko quickly fell in line behind him, with Williams in the rear. Between the three of them, the handful of Geth infantry guarding the tramway were taken down and, with an application of his omni-tool, the tram lit up and smoothly hauled them down to the main spaceport some four klicks east of the secondary spaceport.

The trip was silent, each of the three having nothing but time as the train made its way down its magnetic rail. Alenko, for his part, had tried to start up a bit of small talk, but the attempt fell flat. Shepard only stared ahead, weapon resting at his side, as unapproachable as ever and coiled like a spring. Neither of the two troopers really wanted to talk to him at all, and that suited the frigid Commander just fine. Ashley, though, was a bundle of nerves. For her part, she was little more than a replacement for the two commandos' dead heavy. She had seen what happened to him when she'd picked up his munitions pack, getting all torn up like that, but the other two soldiers seemed totally at ease with his loss.

It was unsettling. She remembered her unit, how close they all were, like Joe and Bhatia and Cobey, like one big family the lot of them. She remembered how they would joke and screw around, how they always seemed to get into those stupid chest pounding competitions with each other, trying to see who had the bigger pair. She remembered how she could trust each and every member of her squad to watch her back, and how they trusted her. She still felt devastated by their loss, and now that she had time to think, she could feel each death weighing her down.

But... looking at the Lieutenant and the Commander, it was like they didn't care at all. Alenko was friendly, sure, but there was something detached about him, like he didn't really care all that much about anything besides his orders. Competent as all hell, and lethal with his biotics, without a doubt one of the best she'd seen yet, and still there was something off-putting about him, like his smile and friendly demeanor was just a veneer. Shepard was worse. If Alenko was unsettling, Shepard just flat-out scared her. He was an artist with that rifle, and cold as ice to boot. Nothing seemed to faze him at all. They'd seen things that would haunt her in her nightmares for years, and some of the things, like the spaceport, that even seemed to set Alenko on edge, but the Commander just glanced at it and moved on.

At first she'd thought he was annoyed with her, or offended by her, given how absolutely frigid he'd been with her. Even when he'd tried to reassure her, she felt more of his domineering presence than any actual sympathy or confidence. His word was absolute, and she wasn't able to say anything but yes sir and suck it up. There was more fear in that than anything else, like he wouldn't hesitate to shoot her if she slowed him down or argued an order. She shut her eyes and quietly shuddered. That was a perfect description of what she thought of him, and he hadn't done anything to assuage that fear.

Ashley could feel the weight of the station as it loomed upon them. It was a feeling, enough to set her off, to make her nervous. Whatever was waiting for them, Geth, the beacon, or even more of those husks, it was there that they stood. She had no doubt that between Shepard and Alenko, the mission would be completed, but she didn't know if she'd be there at the end of it all. Already she could see the ever-growing figures of the Geth on the above platform that rested over the tram well. She watched them scurry, machines in every sense of the word, acting with total efficiency, resting behind cover, waiting for them. The only thing that she could even claim as cover was the thin plating that coiled around the edges of the tram, and even that was little more than ;ayered sheet metal. Barely enough to stop a bullet, and maybe not enough to stop whatever the Geth rifles fired.

A second passed, then two, five, half a minute, then one, and another. Each passing moment sat in her gut like a stone. She was so focused on that sickly feeling that she almost missed the spattering of what sounded like raindrops on the magnetic train. All she could do was drop, hard, behind whatever cover she could, weapon cocked and loaded.

The alien rounds were light, their stopping power lost by distance, but even as it closed she could hear more shots being fired, more bolts hitting harder. She shuddered even as her heartbeat rose. A shot of adrenalizer flowed through her veins, dispensed by her tactical AI. Fire rushed through her, melting away anything but the intense pinging of Geth munitions on their little trolley, which, after a moment, was punctuated by the Commander's rifle thundering through the narrow valleys around them. It seemed that they'd finally come into range of his Longbow. It meant that soon she would be in range to return fire, a thought that made her blood boil under the effects of the stimulant. Her breathing was harsh, tight, and her hands squeezed the grips of her M220, her knuckles popping from the strain.

The barrage got louder, the rounds more frequent, but still far enough to be mostly inaccurate. Ashley rose, only high enough to peak her weapon over the edge of the railing she'd ducked behind, but enough for her to use her rangefinder and her gun camera. Shepard's rifle pounded through the air again, doubtlessly killing another Geth, its report rolling through her like the deepest bass.

Shepard glanced back as Ashley's M220 roared through the air, the vicious braying cutting through even the wind shear of the train as it slowly came to a halt. A barrage of sabot and HEAP rounds clattered against the overhanging guardrail of the overlook, rattling against the sheet metal like a heavy downpour. Pinned for the moment, it was more than enough for both he and Alenko to slip out of the car and onto the loading platform itself. The two stormed up the walkway nearest to them, all while Ashley, still in the tram, volleyed her weapon against the entrenched Geth. Each burst was tight, thrumming the location of any Geth that stuck their heads up, even as they began to circle around to try and flank Williams, moving slowly across the east connecting pathway in patient single file.

They never got the chance. With an almost casual toss, Shepard, who had scaled the ramp and made his way to the opposite entrance of the walkway, sent one of the puck-sized proximity grenades flying strait towards the lead trooper, a large Geth with what looked like an electrical flamethrower strapped to its back. The synthetic soldier barely even registered the small disk as it flew past it, its sausage-shaped head turning just barely as the grenade passed through its peripheral. It was in that exact moment the bomb beeped, just once, and then with a flare of incandescent white detonated. The concussive force alone shredded the two Geth immediately behind the lead, the leader itself not even feeling the shock as the blast set off the tanks of volatile materials strapped to its back, bathing the entire bridge in incandescent blue fire. Between both explosions, over half of the flanking team were torn to pieces, the four still standing knocked strait into the ground, their bodies scraping against the paved ground as they were sent skidding by the shockwave.

In that moment Shepard and Alenko burst out, the crack of the former's rifle claiming another of the downed Geth, gutting it from the waist up and Alenko peppering two more with the rattle of his M98. A second shot from Shepard's Longbow finished the last survivor of the enemy squad, caving in its chest plate and forcing it to the ground. Even as it fell, Alenko and Shepard sprinted past, the biotic diving behind several crates across from the bridge itself and Shepard ducking below the abused side railing of the bridge opposite the Lieutenant. As one, they opened fire on the now-exposed enemy, not a moment too soon. Williams' weapon had overheated, the automated coolant system sending a torrent of nitrogen enriched fluids through the weapon, causing it to spray a gout of steam out it's side, away from her.

Munitions pinged on her position, the trooper coiled behind her rapidly failing cover as the Geth let loose against her. They moved, trying to circumvent her position again, only to find her weapon spattering against them wildly, the heavy munitions flattening out against their shields as they dropped down behind the badly damaged overhang. Shepard opened up on them with another grenade, forcing them down while Alenko threw another powerful biotic bolt against their opposites, pinning them.

Ashley, taking advantage of the lull in fire on her position, sprinted from the car, sporadic plasma rounds pinging against her shields, tearing away chunks of it but not managing to penetrate them before she was able to fall behind cover.

In moments Ashley reached the two other marines, her weapon's report signaling her arrival like a demented herald. Instantly the harsh volley of automatic fire fell against the makeshift cover of the Geth, cutting those hidden behind cargo crates to pieces as the high impact rounds tore through the thin metal of the containers. Coupled with the Commander's sniping and the Lieutenant's support fire, the half dozen remaining synthetics were pinned behind what little cover they could find.

With the aliens effectively suppressed, the three began a quick advance, leapfrogging forward one at a time behind cover, pushing the Geth back with every step. The synthetics, for their part, held true with their deadly accuracy, but bereft of numbers and at a firepower disadvantage, they could do little against the seemingly unending stream of munitions coming from Ashley's M220. From one cover to the next, the three managed to force the Geth back, past the entrance to the rear loading dock of the port, and pushing the three closer to their goal, even as energy and heated steel flew through the air. Minutes passed as the three made their way forward, cutting down two more of the machines as they tried to fall back to better cover, until at last they reached the entrance.

"Alenko," Shepard's voice came over the comms, the word punctuated by another report from his rifle, "I just got a report from the Normandy. There's a Geth dropship incoming from the main battle zone, t-minus five. Captain thinks that they may be coming for the beacon. I'm going to move to intercept, clear the platform and secure it. I want you and Williams to mop up these last few and join me." The Commander said, slotting in another iridium round into his rifle's breach, long since having run out of prepackaged ammunition. "Sat-com is blocked partially by a roof overhang, but the proximity scanners are reading only three movers, all by a heavy energy source. I'm thinking that source is the beacon, so hopefully I'll be able to get the drop on them while you two finish up here."

"Yes, sir." Alenko retorted as he slotted in another clip before cocking his weapon. Ashley nodded her assent as well. Between the Geth and

With that, Shepard motioned for the two to lay down covering fire while he hopped over the makeshift crate barricade and sprinted low to the staircase that lead to the secondary loading platform. The three Geth he saw coming around the corner were facing away, doing something to the beacon. One had a device in it's hand, something very bomblike, in fact. John cursed under his breath.

With a step he jumped up, balancing one foot on the railing and using it to vault over onto some crates. The noise caught the aliens' attention, but even as they turned he sprinted across the stacked cargo, and by the time they noticed him, he was already on top of them. One Geth didn't even feel the shot as Shepard dropped on top of him; his rifle reporting with an angry crack as the point blank shot all but vaporized the upper half of the nearest soldier, the other two barely just beginning to raise their weapons as the infiltrator hit the ground with a roll. His pistol jumped into his hand, his finger pulling the trigger five times in rapid succession, dropping the farther enemy with two holes in its head and three in its chest.

The third opened fire, and Shepard let his shield eat the damage as his foot lashed out, catching the barrel of the alien's weapon, knocking it off center, far enough for him to close into melee with the alien. He let his pistol drop unceremoniously to the ground too close to work the weapon in, and instead shot out with a hard one-two punch combo strait to the chest of the enemy synthetic, before coming around and slamming his elbow clean into its cycloptian eye with enough force to shatter the lens. Even as the alien staggered, Shepard grabbed it's arm, forcing the rifle from its fingers and twisting it back, locking the joints in the process and bending the alien over. His knife slid into his hand and with one swift, practiced motion, the blade was shoved clean through the back of the Geth's neck, the serrated edge ripping away as the razor sliced clean through. Milky white blood poured from the wound, and the machine went slack. Shepard let it fall to the ground unceremoniously.

"Bravo! Bravo, human." A voice said, mockingly from behind. Shepard turned, but the sound of a pistol unfolding gave him pause. Knife gripped tightly in hand, he craned his neck. Behind him stood a Turian, masked, covered from head to toe in gleaming black and red armor. In his hand sat a Citadel-design heavy pistol, a Carnifex, if his d-base was correct, sleek and shining in the light of Eden Prime's sun. He had it pointed right at Shepard, and while the infiltrator's own pistol rested at his feet, he wasn't sure if he could grab it in time to stop the alien from splattering his head across the ground. At that range, with that gun, his shields would pop like a bubble, and his armor wasn't rated for its stopping power. Not against something like that.

"And who might you be?" Shepard said, taking a careful step to the left, moving in tandem with the Turian as it circled him like a shark.

"Oh? Me? Nobody of any consequence, I assure you, Commander." The alien retorted, not relaxing the pistol a bit as the two moved. Slowly, the infiltrator turned towards his opposite, until his chest faced the Turian's.

"Then it seems you have me at a disadvantage. I take it you're with the Geth?" Shepard said, goading the alien into talking while he inched closer, almost imperceptibly so. The alien seemed to be amused by that statement, letting out a throaty chuckle as he moved.

"Another thing I don't think I'll confirm or deny, as you humans are so fond of saying." His tone was smug, and Shepard grimaced. The Turian moved like a well-trained predator, coiled tightly even as he stood relaxed, a gun in his hand. Shepard just inched farther back, slowly, just enough to get to where he wanted to be.

"Not very forthcoming, are you!" With a flick of his wrist, the Commander sent his knife flying on a tight ark, the blade impacting the alien's gun hand, causing his opposite to flinch, just slightly, and squeeze the trigger. The round barely grazed Shepard's shields, the gun's recoil shifting it just far enough for Shepard to close in. His hand shot out and wrapped around the Turian's wrist, his other bunching up into an open fist and slamming into the butt of the gun's handle, knocking it clean from the alien's grasp and flying away.

The alien bent with the attack, it's elbow cracking across Shepard's helmet and knocking him away as it staggered back with a growl while it's foot took him in the side and sent him rolling, the shock knocking Shepard's own pistol skidding away in the process.

"You'll pay for that, human!" It hissed, its clawed foot hooking the Commander's discarded knife and flipping it into its hand with professional ease. Shepard reached behind his back, drawing another blade, a stabbing dagger akin to the weapon he'd thrown. He fell into a tight stance, weapon held downwards in his hand as the Turian fell into its own, blade up. The two held a silent, pregnant pause, each watching the other with harsh gazes. At melee range, shields and barriers were useless, the kinetic fields having been designed to stop bullets and energy bolts, leaving them woefully useless against anything not moving at sonic speeds.

"And you talk too much." Was all Shepard replied, and with that he slid forward, low to the ground, his blade lashing out like a viper. The Turian met him head on, and sparks flew as the daggers hit. Shepard's knee flew up, but found itself blocked as he was pushed back, the alien's superior strength forcing him off balance. Using its momentum, the armored Turian moved to gut Shepard while he was off guard. Shepard blocked, just barely, and responded with a harsh elbow to the helmet. The two broke. The exchange had lasted seconds.

"Not bad, but not good enough." The alien snorted arrogantly, and Shepard saw a thin slash on his stomach, just enough to leave a mark on the plate. The Commander let off a grunt and shot back into close range, his empty hand leading with a palm strike that the Turian tried to catch with his own blade. Shepard flew into action as his opponent fell for his feint, his hand sliding around his enemy's, knocking his knife low and letting him get a tight stab in on the alien's mask. The shock jolted the Turian, before he brought his own knife to bear. The two locked, Shepard holding his opponent's low arm, blade hovering centimeters from gutting him through his diaphragm while the Turian fought to hold off Shepard's stab from punching though his visor.

"Die, damn you!" Snarled the alien, pressing harder, forcing a step forward and pushing his enemy off balance. The two stumbled, but not before Shepard's blade glanced off of the Turian's faceplate, gouging it. The alien recovered too quickly to be natural, however, and managed to nearly gut the Commander on a side swipe, the only thing stopping him being a sloppy reversal that ended up forcing both blades from their respective soldiers' hands. The knives clattered as the Turian took Shepard on the low with a hard tackle, sending them both to the ground. Shepard rolled hard, his legs moving to make a tight pin on the alien, but the Turian's superior strength forced him to break and try to roll back. The move wasn't quite as successful as Shepard hoped, the alien's foot catching him clean in the mask as he moved. Stunned, he fell back, and that was all his enemy needed in order to mount him and start hammering away at his head with a stack of vicious punches.

Shepard's arms went up, protecting his face after only two shots and his legs wrapped around the Turian's waist, reversing the hold and cracking the alien's skull on the ground. Stunned, the alien was forced to eat a hard knee drop to the stomach before it managed to force Shepard off. The two scrambled to their feet, Shepard rising in tandem with his opponent. It was in that instant that Ashley and Kaiden came barreling down the entry ramp, weapons raised and tracing onto the Turian.

"Damn." Was all the alien said as he stepped back. His voice was harsh, the earlier arrogance absent as he took a step back. Across the bay both troopers took up cover while Shepard grabbed the Turian's nearby pistol, his own laying a dozen meters away.

"Now that we've settled that, what's your name?" Shepard held up his opponent's handgun, knowing full well how effective it would be at blowing chunks of the Turian off at the slightest provocation. Said Turian snorted roughly, and stood strait.

"Hmm." It grunted back, and gave a sharp snort. Shepard put a round uncomfortably close to its head; the shot scraping against his opposite's shields like a nail on a chalkboard before ripping through.

"Now, alien. Your name, or the next one goes into your head and we'll figure it out at a morgue." Snarled the infiltrator, finger tugging against the weapon's trigger. He sighted the barrel right into the middle of the alien's skull.

"Alright... alright. Calm down, human. I'm...," The Turian started, and Shepard's eyes narrowed. Just then, an unsettling screech tore across the battlefield, and from over the loading dock's roof a Geth dropship shot from overhead, a side panel at its bottom open and with three Geth firing in unison on the bay. Alenko and Williams returned fire while Shepard faced down the Turian. A shot came uncomfortably close, and the Turian gave a cold chuckle.

"I'm someone you'll meet again, human. Count on it." The alien snarled and palmed a grenade. He flicked it with a casual toss, and Shepard fired even as he dodged hard to the side, the round ripping across the Turian's helmeted cheek. In that very instant the explosive went off, tossing the Commander hard into the Prothean beacon as the Turian jumped onto the dropship. It forcefully took off seconds later, the hatch closing as the alien looked back at the three marines as the ship vanished into the clouds.

Shepard, for his part, slammed into the Prothean construct, the wind getting knocked clean out of him as he felt his back pop at the impact, his shields holding off the worst of the concussive blast but popping from the strain. The shock was enough to stun him as he slid down and felt his body impact the base of the beacon before barely rolling off. Shoulders aching, he sat on his hands and knees, back throbbing, dizzied by the awkward landing. He felt his entire body throb, his shields having eaten most of the shrapnel and the blast wave, but his body still sore from the pressure that had managed to get through.

As he sat stunned, Shepard didn't notice the beacon behind him start to thrum with power. He didn't see the bits of energy start to coil around the pillar-like construct, nor the green aura that began to leak out around him. He didn't feel the energy coil around him, the energy pulsing softly as it charged the air. His ears were ringing, drowning out everything while he tried to clear the black spots from his vision. Blinded and deaf, it wasn't until he actually felt the beacon's energy grip him and physically drag him off the ground, that he realized just what position he was in.

Ashley and Kaiden could only watch in horror, pinned by the escaping Geth ship, as green lightning crackled across the Commander's body. All he could do was scream as the energy seared image after image, thousands of them, strait into his mind. Death, fire, blood, pain, a mission mixed and crushing emotions tearing through him, and sights more horrible and terrifying than he could comprehend wrapped around him. Millions of screamed, feverish words melted into an unexplainable gibberish, deafening him, while flames so bright they seared his eyes tore through his mind.

It felt like hours, even though it lasted barely seconds, and as soon as the green lightning came, it blinked out, and Shepard fell bonelessly to the ground below.

_~End Chapter One: Part Two~_

* * *

**AN:** And this is the second part of chapter one, finishing off everything that I had prewritten. Honestly this took me places that I wasn't entirely comfortable with. I'm told pieces of it do seem forced, but I think that has more to do with my shoddy transitioning than anything else. I'm honestly not sure as to how or where it seems like that, so I'll leave it up to you guys.

One of the things I have found is that trying to keep things in perspective is hard, especially when you eyeball it from a lesser and greater perspective. It's clear there are things going on outside of the characters, but I treat that as background for the sake of working with the characters themselves. All I can say to that is I'll try to be more mindful of it in the future while working on newer chapters. I really don't see a lot of the issues, so that's where constructive criticism would come in handy, wink wink nudge nudge. I have gotten a lot of really good feedback on this already, and to everyone whose contributed so far, thank you. It really is helping me, a lot.

As for this latest codex, I actually drew a lot of my influence from that same image I told you about in the last picture, as well as from the works of Shimmering-Sword, especially his Contact weapons and imagery. He's an amazing artist and I draw a lot of my inspiration from his works. Really good stuff, all around.

Beyond that, I really don't have much else to say. I hope you've enjoyed things thus far, and that you'll stick around for more in the future!

* * *

**Codex:** Rosenkov-Ariake Tactical Assault Kit and Heavy Arms

Throughout the centuries of manned space travel, the Empire has found itself facing a wide array of threats, both internal and external, and has found itself needing a spanning and variable number of options in which to combat those threats. With the advent of the Empire's discovery of extraterrestrial intelligences, this fact has only become more and more proven with the march of time and experience. Kinetic barriers and medi-gel have been difficult opponents to traditional arms research, as well as biotics, regeneration, hard-light omni-tool programs and more, each creating a tapestry of hurdles that any modern arm would need to surpass in order to remain effective. Weapons would need to remain functional in caustic atmosphere, in no atmosphere, super dense atmosphere, underwater, in extreme highs and lows, and variable pressure, all while maintaining a high level of accuracy and damage potential.

It was with these thoughts in mind that the Rosenkov-Ariake Institute introduced the M93 Tactical Assault Rifle, the predecessor to the now widespread M98 Field Assault Rifle. Utilizing a mix of nano-fiberweave and tempered carbon steel in its construction, it boasts an impressive three hundred hours of field functionality in even the worst atmospheric conditions, is impact and sludge resistant, and boasts an impressive sixty percent penetration against standard kinetic barriers, only fifteen percent less than traditional Mass Effect based weapons. The decision to use a chemical accelerant as opposed to an Element Zero propulsion system was shown to increase weapon viability in a number of situations, despite it's criticism, and allows for larger, heavier rounds, which have been shown to be significantly more effective against traditional armor as well as reducing the effectiveness of medi-gel, increasing casualty rates amongst targets by almost three hundred percent.

The loss against kinetic barrier systems is an acceptable tradeoff, considering the lack of need for internal cooling mechanisms, making the weapon easier to mass produce and greatly decreases the downtime between exchanges. The use of chemical accelerants has also shown a marked increase in munitions viability, as well as munitions capacity due to the lack of need for heat sinks in any capacity outside of specific cyclical weapons, such as the M480 Vulcan or the M5-A2 "Firestorm" portable napalm launcher. With the advent of frictionless materials, it has been found that most Rosenkov-Ariake field arms can maintain a constant fire rate for several days if necessary before notable damage is done to the weapon's firing apparatus or barrel.

Since it's inception, Rosenkov-Ariake has been a reliable producer of arms and munitions, including their line of Longbow "Scram" rail-based weapons, Parcher hand held launcher platforms, and a number of lesser seen field arms, including a few Mass Effect based weapons, and have set the standard for small arms mass production. With the standardization of the tungsten-cobalt 10mm round, made universally applicable with most M-Series arms, a significant amount of logistical capacity has been moved towards fielding more troops and better gear as opposed to reworking or resupplying equipment lost or damaged due to specialized requirements. RA weapons have been proven time and again as the most reliable, flexible, maintainable arms of any nationalized force, and since their explosion onto the free market, have become a staple amongst lower-budget mercenary groups and organizations.


End file.
